Connor Hellebuyck and Jake Oettinger became fast friends at the 4 Nations. They’ll team up again to chase Olympic glory, but the road to a Stanley Cup could again see them going toe-to-toe in the NHL playoffs.
Goaltending is pain.
When Connor Hellebuyck was a lad in Michigan, his path began with roller hockey. He played on the streets with his brother and the neighborhood kids, albeit without the appropriate padding for a netminder.
“Before my dad knew what was going on, I was wearing a player chest pad, so anytime my brother would shoot and hit me in the arm, it would destroy me,” he said. “But I found a love for it, and I had a knack for it.”
A knack for it. Now that’s an understatement. After going from Michigan high-school hockey to the NAHL and then college with UMass-Lowell, Hellebuyck is now the reigning Vezina and Hart Trophy winner.
For Jake Oettinger, his painful epiphany came a bit later in life. As a 15-year-old high-schooler in Minnesota, he had a world of options ahead of him. One was the WHL, so he went to Portland’s rookie camp to see what the league was all about after he had been drafted by the Winterhawks.
“I was sitting on the bench with my gloves off, getting ready to go in,” he said. “A guy got hit along the boards, and his skate came up on my hand. I had three months of finger surgeries after that, so that was like God telling me I needed to go to college.”
Oettinger stayed with his high-school team in Lakeville before heading off to USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program and then, as pre-ordained, Boston University. Now, he’s the starter in Dallas, where, every year, the Stars threaten to make a run for the organization’s second Stanley Cup title.
If the Stars hope to do that, there’s a good chance they’ll have to go through Hellebuyck’s Winnipeg Jets again, after defeating Winnipeg in six games last spring. But before that happens, Oettinger and Hellebuyck will be teammates with Team USA at the Olympics, where the Americans have a mandate from GM Bill Guerin to win the country’s first men’s hockey gold since the Miracle on Ice way back in 1980.
I LEARNED A LOT FROM HIM. I TOOK THINGS FROM HIS DAY-TO-DAY ROUTINE THAT I REALLY LIKED AND IMPLEMENTED THEM– JAKE OETTINGER-
Had it not been for the heroics of a third Central Division goalie – St. Louis Blues and Team Canada No. 1 Jordan Binnington – the Americans likely would have won a best-on-best tournament last season at the 4 Nations Face-Off.
Hellebuyck and Oettinger were Team USA’s main goalies (Boston’s Jeremy Swayman was the third-stringer), and they acquitted themselves well. While the result didn’t go in their favor, the tournament gave the pair a chance to get to know each other ahead of February’s Milan Olympics.
“It was great,” said Oettinger, 26. “I learned a lot from him. I took things from his day-to-day routine that I really liked and implemented them. Getting to know him, he’s very cerebral and thinks about the game a lot, like Ben Bishop, who I learned a lot from. Spending time with both of those guys helped my hockey IQ and changed the way I think of things.”
While Hellebuyck is older, the 32-year-old also cherished the time he spent with Oettinger at the 4 Nations.
“It was pretty cool,” he said. “You get to play against these guys, but you don’t get to see how they practise. You see how guys build their game, how they work out, how they conduct themselves, and that’s what sets guys apart from each other. We get along pretty well, and just being able to chat about goaltending is fun for me.”
It was a rollercoaster of a year for Hellebuyck. He was the losing goaltender in the 4 Nations gold medal game, but he also had the best save percentage in the tournament among netminders who played more than one game. He won the Hart and Vezina at the end of the NHL year, but he had a whiplash-inducing post-season, getting roasted for five goals or more in his first four playoff road games. It wasn’t the only reason Winnipeg lost in the second round to Dallas, but it didn’t help.
“For me now, those playoffs, I took a big look at my game,” Hellebuyck said. “I thought maybe I could add or tweak some things, but once I did that, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the look of the game. I thought I was out of what makes me, me. So I actually went back to just playing my game. You really have to look at the whole picture. There were some bad games, goals-against-wise, but you take those out and I felt I had a good playoffs. It’s just those big losses make everything else seem worse.”
Oettinger bested Hellebuyck in that second round, but he met his own Waterloo right after, with Dallas falling to Edmonton in the conference final. He was pulled in the decisive Game 5 after giving up two quick goals, and the post-game blame from Peter DeBoer led to the coach getting fired. At the NHL player tour media scrum in Las Vegas in September, Oettinger told the media that DeBoer had still not contacted him to apologize or set the record straight.
Like Hellebuyck, Oettinger isn’t staying down about the end of last season.
“It was pretty easy to move on,” he said. “You think about it for a little bit, and then you try to take the positives away from the run. I felt great about my game for about two-and-a-half rounds. Now, I’m thinking about how I can do that for four rounds.”
While the ends of their playoff runs were dire, we’re still talking about two of the best goaltenders on the planet right now, the vanguard of an American goaltending revolution that has very much been planned by USA Hockey and is very much working.
JUST BEING ABLE TO CHAT ABOUT GOALTENDING IS FUN FOR ME– CONNOR HELLEBUYCK-
As a battery, Oettinger and Hellebuyck will come into the Olympics as the tournament’s strongest 1-2 punch, and with a healthy blueline (Charlie McAvoy missed the end of the 4 Nations while Quinn Hughes missed the whole thing due to injury), Team USA will be one of the favorites. Although the Americans finished second at the 4 Nations, it was a valuable experience ahead of Milan.
“I went into it thinking the game would be so much faster – and it was – but everyone on your side is also so much faster, so it actually ended up feeling slowed down a little bit,” Hellebuyck said.
“Things were what-you-see-is-what-you-get, and that plays really well into my game. You could see things develop, and the guys around me were always where I expected them to be, and they always had my back. It was hard to the point where all these elite players could score at any moment, but when your guys are keeping everything to the outside and you can see everything perfectly, it kind of makes your job easier.”
As for the Stanley Cup, Winnipeg and Dallas are teams to watch once again. It won’t be easy to get out of the West with the likes of Colorado, Vegas and Edmonton still at full force, but in both markets, the urgency to win it all is there. Oettinger, entering his sixth NHL season, believes he knows what he must do to help Dallas get back to the promised land.
“At times, I feel I’ve done it for stretches or series,” he said. “But how do you do it night in, night out? The consistency is what I’m thinking of. I feel like I always have a two-week stretch that kills my stats. So how do I keep my level up?”
Any Vezina talk is secondary. “Where I’m at now,” he said, “I just want to make the playoffs and win the Stanley Cup.”
He may have to go through Hellebuyck again to do so. At the Olympics, they can team up for glory. In the NHL, only one can come out on top in the end.
This is an excerpt of a feature that appeared in The Hockey News' Goalie Issue 2025. We profile NHLers Connor Hellebuyck, Jake Oettinger and Karel Vemjelka, and we look at the art of puckhandling. Also, we say goodbye to three goaltending greats in Ken Dryden, Bernie Parent and Ed Giacomin.
Elsewhere in the issue, we count down the NHL's best crease duos, look at the future of goaltending for every NHL organization, explore what rule changes the NHL could "borrow" from other leagues and feature some of the best keepers from leagues across North America and the world.
You can get it in print for free when you subscribe to The Hockey News at THN.com/Free today. All subscriptions include complete access to more than 76 years of articles at The Hockey News Archive.