Maple Leafs Third Goalie Problem: Alexandar Georgiev Is Still Free

The Maple Leafs third goalie question is the one Chayka has not answered

The Maple Leafs third goalie situation is the last soft spot on a roster that has otherwise been rebuilt from the studs. Toronto will open 2026-27 with Sergei Bobrovsky and Anthony Stolarz in the crease and, behind them, a 24-year-old with 22 career AHL playoff games of relevant evidence and a 25-year-old depth signing. Across 84 regular-season games, in front of a defence corps the front office has publicly called unfinished, that is not a plan. It is a hope.

Meanwhile, a goaltender who led the NHL in wins two seasons ago is sitting unsigned with camp roughly a month away. Alexandar Georgiev terminated his KHL contract with Spartak Moskva in June specifically to pursue an NHL return, and he has not found a job. Toronto should be on the phone, and the vehicle is a professional tryout, not a contract.

To be clear about the argument: this is not a case for Georgiev the starter. It is a case that the cost of a PTO is zero and the cost of Toronto's current third-goalie plan failing in November is enormous.

What Toronto actually has in net

Start with the top two, because the depth argument depends on them.

Bobrovsky signed a three-year deal worth roughly $7 million annually after the Panthers let him reach the market. He is 37, he has played at least 50 games in nine of the past 10 seasons, and he arrives off the worst statistical year of his Florida tenure: 52 games, a 27-23-1 record, a 3.07 goals-against average and an .877 save percentage. Some of that is a Panthers team that missed the playoffs. Some of it is age. Nobody honestly knows the split, which is why we called the signing a swing factor rather than a solution.

Stolarz is the more established variable, in the sense that his variance is well documented. In 2024-25 he led the NHL with a .926 save percentage across a career-high 34 games, with a 2.14 goals-against average and four shutouts. In 2025-26 he played 26 games, went 10-10-3 with a 3.28 goals-against average and an .893 save percentage, missed time with an upper-body injury, and finished the season shelved by a groin strain suffered April 8 against Washington that cost him the final four games. He avoided offseason surgery. He has also never played more than 34 games in a season.

So Toronto's crease is a 37-year-old coming off a bad year and a goaltender with an excellent peak who has never carried a starter's workload. That is a defensible tandem. It is not one you build without insurance.

The depth chart got thinner on purpose

Chayka cleared out the old crease entirely. Joseph Woll went to Philadelphia in the new GM's first move, and Dennis Hildeby was sent to Tampa Bay on July 1 as part of the package that brought Nick Paul to Toronto, alongside a 2027 fourth-round pick and a 2028 third.

What is left behind Bobrovsky and Stolarz is Artur Akhtyamov and Samuel Hlavaj. Akhtyamov is a genuinely encouraging story: the 24-year-old, a fourth-round pick in 2020, won the Jack A. Butterfield Trophy as MVP of the 2026 Calder Cup Playoffs after going 15-7 with a 2.22 goals-against average, a .923 save percentage and two shutouts in 22 appearances, carrying the Marlies to the franchise's first championship since 2018. We wrote at the time about what that run meant for Toronto's goalie pipeline.

But an AHL playoff MVP award is not NHL readiness, and the organization's own plan has Akhtyamov starting the season with the Marlies. Hlavaj, 25 and undrafted, was signed as organizational insurance after an AHL season in Iowa that was, by the numbers, ordinary. Neither is a player you want making his 15th career NHL start in Boston in December because your starter's groin went again.

Why 84 games changes the math

The league's expansion to 84 games is the part of this that gets waved away and should not be. Two extra games is trivial in isolation. The schedule that comes with them is not: the season starts earlier, the preseason has been trimmed, and the compression means back-to-backs and three-in-fours land more often.

Toronto's own calendar makes this concrete — the Maple Leafs face a 16-game October. If Bobrovsky plays 50 and Stolarz plays 30, that leaves four starts for somebody else in a perfectly healthy season. Nobody has a perfectly healthy season, and the two goaltenders in question have specific, documented durability questions.

The new CBA also gives every club a full-time emergency backup who travels and practises with the team beginning in 2026-27, which we covered when the EBUG rule changed. That solves the beer-league-goalie-in-net problem. It does not solve the problem of needing a real NHL goaltender for six starts in February.

Georgiev is available, and he is not what he was

Both halves of that sentence matter.

Georgiev's peak is real and recent. In 2023-24 with Colorado he led the NHL with 38 wins as a full-time starter. What followed was a hard fall: a difficult stretch in San Jose, then a one-year, $825,000 deal with Buffalo in September 2025 that ended with a brief stint in Rochester and a parting of ways. He signed with Spartak Moskva, posted a 2.37 goals-against average and a .918 save percentage in 24 KHL appearances, and then terminated the deal. His agent, Stanislav Romanov, has said the intention is an NHL comeback.

The honest read is that Georgiev in 2026 is a reclamation project. The KHL numbers are decent, not dominant, and the league is not a clean translation. He has not been an above-average NHL goaltender since 2023-24. Most clubs are set in net, which is exactly why he is still available in mid-August, and the remaining openings around the league are backup and organizational roles.

That is precisely what makes him the right target for Toronto. The Maple Leafs are not shopping for a starter. They are shopping for the third-best goaltender in an organization that currently does not have one.

The case for a PTO, and the case against

The case for is mostly about cost. A professional tryout does not count against the salary cap, does not commit a contract slot, and can be walked away from in September with no consequence. Toronto is currently about $2.75 million over the cap and needs to shed money before opening night, a squeeze laid out in our piece on Toronto's compliance problem. A PTO is the only kind of addition a team in that position can make freely.

It also creates competition without cost. If Georgiev looks finished in camp, he goes home and Akhtyamov's path is unchanged. If he looks like an NHL goaltender, Toronto has a league-minimum option to sign in-season when injury inevitably forces the issue — a far better position than scanning the waiver wire in December.

The case against is Akhtyamov. A 24-year-old coming off a Calder Cup and a playoff MVP award needs starts, not a veteran parachuted in above him. That argument is legitimate and it is the reason this should be a tryout rather than a one-way deal. Akhtyamov should get the Marlies' crease and the first call-up. Georgiev, if he signs at all, should be on an AHL or two-way arrangement behind him — depth, not a blockade.

There is also a reasonable position that Toronto simply should not care. Third goalies rarely decide seasons. But Toronto is a team with a two-year window, a captain returning from knee surgery, an over-the-cap sheet and no margin for a six-week stretch of replacement-level goaltending. This is the cheapest available hedge against the failure mode that would actually end the season.

What's next

PTO season runs through the first two weeks of September; Toronto has been linked to tryout candidates all summer, and our PTO board tracks the skaters. Camp opens ahead of the September 29 home opener against Montreal, and the goaltending depth chart will be effectively settled by the end of the preseason.

Watch for two things. First, whether Chayka brings any goaltender in on a tryout at all — silence would signal genuine confidence in Akhtyamov as the emergency answer. Second, how Jim Hiller splits the preseason starts. If Akhtyamov gets meaningful NHL preseason minutes rather than the third period of split-squad games, the organization has already decided he is the third goalie. That would be a bold call. It might also be the right one. It should not be the only one on the table.