2025-26 Season in Review: Stuart Skinner (and also Tristan Jarry)

Vitals

Player: Stuart Skinner
Born: Nov 1, 1998
Height: 6-feet 4 inches
Weight: 215 pounds
Hometown: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Catches: Left
Draft: Third round pick (78th overall) in 2017 by the Edmonton Oilers
2025-26 Statistics: With Edmonton – 23 games (11-8-4 record, 2.83 GAA, .891 save%, 2 shutouts). With Pittsburgh – 27 games (12-9-5 record, 2.99 GAA, .885 save%)
Contract Status: Unrestricted free agent on July 1

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Story of the Season

For the first time, a joint player review! It’s more like a ‘Penguin veteran goalie’ review day, which was Tristan Jarry when the season started. Jarry played well for the Pens at the beginning of the year (9-3-1 record, 2.66 GAA, .909 save%) only to see a shocking trade made seemingly out of nowhere on December 12th that sent him to Edmonton for Stuart Skinner, Brett Kulak and a 2029 second round pick.

In that moment, the future of the crease in Pittsburgh was changed. Skinner fit into Jarry’s place as part of the goalie rotation with Arturs Silovs, alternating in and out of the lineup almost every other game.

It turned out to be the perfect timing for the Pens to cut ties with Jarry and his onerous contract. The negative patterns of his career – namely injury and second-half decline – ended up repeating once again this season. Within three games of joining the Oilers, Jarry got hurt and was out for nearly a month. Once back, his play steadily regressed and he lost the position of being the Edmonton’s starting goalie by March. Jarry was only called on for one playoff game, where he took an overtime loss in Edmonton’s Game 4 against Anaheim.

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On the other side of the equation, Skinner wasn’t tremendous but performed better statistically than Silovs for much of the season. That allowed Skinner to eventually nudge ever-so-slightly to the front of the line to earn being the Pens’ starting goalie at the beginning of the playoffs. Skinner performed fairly well against the Flyers in Games 1 and 2, allowing only five total goals – but his team wasn’t sharp and lost both games. Skinner was shakier in Game 3 where he gave a couple of questionable goals, and four total in another loss. At that point he was benched for the remainder of the series when the team gave Silovs a shot.

Monthly Splits

via Yahoo

Skinner was at his best for the Pens in January, providing some very sturdy play and winning seven of his eight starts. No other month was particularly impressive on paper, but considering the Pens finished three points ahead of ninth placed Washington in the standings an elevated January performance stands out as one of many factors that helped make Pittsburgh into a playoff team. Had Skinner had his fairly usual type of record, say a 4-3-2 January, that would have meant four less points in the standings. There’s no shortage of little variables that all combined to add up to a successful season for the team at large so that period for Skinner could be seen as just as important as anything else an individual contributed along the way (including going back to a 30 save on 31 shot night on 12/30 in a 5-1 win against Carolina that stands out as perhaps Skinner’s finest game as a Penguin).

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Charts n’at

Via Advanced Hockey Stats and NHL Edge

The tale of the tape regarding GSAA for the two goalies traded for one another was just about the same until the Olympic break. Skinner ended up being pretty strong at +5.35 GSAA overall in 27 games as a Penguin and +9.05 GSAA on his entire season. Jarry, as tends to be his calling card, fell apart over the second half of the season. Jarry ended up with a -3.41 GSAA for his campaign, a tremendous fall from his +10.2 peak in late-January.

In the end, perhaps fittingly, the story ended the same for both goalies – they each watched from the bench as their respective teams lost in the first round of the playoffs.

Skinner’s advanced numbers might give him a little more credit than his reputation suggests. His save percentage wasn’t impressive but was better than the expectation (dashed blue line in the bottom right). Now with the benefit of time passing by, it’s easy to see he was miscast in Edmonton as a 50-60 game No. 1 starter role he filled from 2022-25. Hopefully on his next team he can slot in as a 1B or backup and he will have a chance to shine in the right situation. Some rumors already are out there that Ottawa may or should be interested in him, which might be a good spot. If I were his rep, I’d probably keep an eye out for what teams like Florida, Tampa and Winnipeg might be looking for as clubs that potentially seeking a secondary goalie option this summer.

As for Jarry, well, there’s no nice way to put it, his declining level of play combined with his contract is a massive issue for the Oilers moving forward. He was brought into be the solution and ended up making the situation even worse than it previously was. Whether it was physical, mental or some combination of both, the change of scenery did little to alter what’s become the downward slope of his career.

Skinner was slightly better than Silovs when it came to high danger save percentage (.775% for the Latvian), though neither were particularly good relative to the rest of the NHL goalies at large. All other things fairly equal, that slight advantage is a big reason on what helped to give Skinner the edge in being named the team’s No. 1 goalie at the start of the playoffs. (For his part, Jarry was pretty strong at high danger shots, stopping 82.5% of them. However, his mid-range and long-range numbers were absolutely atrocious and among the worst in the league.)

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Highlights