From Beauvillier to Wilson, we’re taking a look at and grading the 2024-25 season for every player who laced ‘em up for the Washington Capitals for a significant number of games during the campaign, with an eye towards 2025-24. Next up, Logan Thompson.
The Bio:
#48 | Goalie | Catches: Right
Height: 6’4” | Weight: 207 | Born: February 25, 1997
Birthplace: Calgary, AB | Acquired: Traded to the Caps on June 29, 2024 for a 2024 3rd round and 2025 3rd round pick
Cap Hit: $5,850,000 | Signed Through: 2030-31 | Expiry Status: Unrestricted Free Agent
The Scouting Report (via EP)
The Stats:
The Charts:
The Key Stat: In his first season with Washington, Thompson finished in the top-10 in the League in wins (6th), Goals Against Average (7th) and Save Percentage (9th).
The Good: Thompson began the season alternating starts with fellow southpaw backstop Charlie Lindgren in a “1A/1B” arrangement, but solidified his role as the top dog (and earned a massive new contract) before Groundhog’s Day, thanks in large part to an 8-0-1/.947/1.48/two-shutout January that earned him the League’s second star for the month. But it wasn’t just a hot month for LT – his line for the three-month span starting with November was a comical 19-2-3/.935/1.85 and really fueled a hot first half of the season that allowed the Caps to largely coast the rest of the way. Thompson had a 16-game point streak (13-0-3) from December 22 through February 22, which was the second-longest in team history (Jose Theodore had a 19-game streak in 2009-10), during which he had a 198:22 shutout streak in mid-January. The Caps simply won games with Thompson in net (and were able to scrounge up points in half of the rare times they didn’t). Oh, and he beat Vegas twice, allowing two goals in each game and stopping 94.1 percent of the shots the Golden Knights put on him, which had to feel pretty good after the team had all but given up on him and shipped him to D.C.
Thompson arguably was snubbed as a Vezina Trophy finalist, finishing fourth in voting (ironically just behind the man he replaced in the Caps cage, Darcy Kuemper) for his regular-season work.
In the playoffs, Thompson put up solid numbers in aggregate, posting the top save percentage (.917) and fourth-best GAA (2.41) among dudes with at least four games played, giving the Caps a “quality start” in seven of the ten games he played (up from his regular-season mark of .643 and well above the League-average of .535).
The Bad: Coincidentally or not, Thompson’s play dropped off a bit after signing his contract extension, figurately and somewhat literally limping into the playoffs, as he went 8-4-3/.877/3.33 before suffering an injury in early April that would end his regular-season prematurely.
As noted above, Thompson’s playoffs look very good… in aggregate. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. He was legitimately terrific in three or four of the five games in the first round (depending on your assessment of Game 4) and was the single biggest reason the Caps were able to advance, and he continued his heater splitting the first two games of the Carolina series while yielding just three goals. But he close out the second round with three straight losses (the first two of which saw him allow four Canes tallies) and an .884 save percentage that might even flatter how he looked as he simply didn’t make all the stops “he’s gotta have.” The terrible-angle series-clincher he allowed was emblematic of his form at that point in the series, the kind of low-danger horseshit (LDHS) that Carolina lives and dies by, and, on this one and a handful like it, they lived. Whether it was a lingering injury, a career high in minutes played in a season, a general lack of focus or “other,” Thompson needed to be better than he was there at the end (which, of course, is far from a unique situation – League-wide there’s usually one goalie who ends the season without wishing he’d done a little more).
The Video:
The Discussion: Just how good is Logan Thompson? Is he the “true number one” his contract says he is, or more of a 1A/1B? What should his workload look like next year? Is Thompson reliable or “streaky” (and, if so, is that necessarily a bad thing)? How comfortable are you with Logan Thompson as the club’s franchise netminder for the next few years?
The Vote: Rate Logan Thompson below on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best) based on his performance relative to his potential and your expectations for the season – so if he had the best year you could have imagined him having, give him a 10; if he more or less played as you expected he would, give him a 5 or a 6; if he had the worst year you could have imagined him having, give him a 1.