Look, I gotta explain this woman to y'all.
For the first eight games of the Stanley Cup playoffs this year, 2026, the Carolina Hurricanes' (male) goalie, Frederick Andersen, was doing some of the best work of his career. He allowed just 1.12 average goals per game for those eight game -- anything under 2 is top tier in professional hockey, anything under 1.5 maintained for long approaches "that doesn't even look like an achievable number" -- and kept up a save percentage of 95.2%, where anything above a 92% is solid top tier. He fumbled one game in the third round and dropped to a 1.56 average goals allowed (they label it GAA for Goals Against, Average) and 92.3% saves made (they actually write it as 0.923 like a baseball batter's hitting average, but I prefer translating it), which is still a very high level of play but not inhumanly good like his stats through the first two rounds.
I tell you all this to put it in context that this season in the PWHL, in the regular season, Ann-Renée Desbiens played 25 games and kept up a GAA of 1.11 and a save percentage of 0.955 or 95.5%. That is to say, better stats than the most insanely high-tier goaltending I've ever seen in the men's league, for three times as many games.
The highest career-long record save percentage by a (male) NHL goalie is 0.922, a tie between Dominik Hasek and Ken Dryden. Desbiens doesn't have as many seasons of play that I could find records of, because women's hockey has always struggled to get a regular professional league going; it's often been Olympic only, once you leave college. But over her PWHL and college careers (I can't find records for any previous women's leagues she played for), her *lowest* single-season save percentage is 0.923 and her PWHL career average right now, over three regular seasons, stands at 0.927 save percent.
Now, to be very fair, I don't know if she could keep up the same numbers in the NHL (or the "MNHL", Men's National Hockey League, as PWHL fans have taken to calling it in the league's YouTube stream chat); women's hockey does move slightly slower than men's -- I don't know of any female players with a 117mph slap shot or whatever Connor McDavid's record is anymore -- and the refs are a bit more willing to whistle a play dead when there's a scrum directly in front of the net, rather than wait to see if the puck will wind up anywhere entertaining.
But I have extremely strong opinions on hockey goalie play (I was defense by preference when I played soccer, defense and goalies will always have opinions on how the other one could improve their play), I'm always keeping an eye on the goalies when I watch archived games with the NHL greats; I will be the first to tell you that as much as I love Marc-André Fleury, the only reason that man survived to forty is that you're not allowed to hit goalies, because he *would* do things like turn his back on Alexander Ovechkin while trying to play the puck instead of staying in his damn crease.
And anyway, I can tell you that if they'd let women goalies in the NHL (which since, as mentioned, you can't hit goalies, the only reasons not to are general sexism and the particular sexism that male players in every sport get absurdly snitty about their locker rooms), she has better discipline than... really any of the guys I can think of off the top of my head? She's got the reflexes, the puck sense, I would honestly bet money if I had any that she could be consistently top ten NHL year over year in both GAA and save percent. Right now the only active male goalie who reliably maintains that standing is Andrei Vasilevsky, whom they call "the Big Cat" because his reflex speed and the ways he'll contort to stop a puck are absolutely feline. He's arguably the greatest hockey goalie of this generation -- out of the ones who are allowed to play in the NHL.
God, the amounts of money I'd pay (hypothetically, if I had them) to see some kind of exhibition match with Vasy and ARD in net. They should bring her to the All-Star game or something, that's a very silly event anyway and the points don't matter (well, there are cash prizes, but it doesn't affect like your playoff eligibility or anything).
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