When you start sorting through NHL goaltending records, Martin Brodeur’s name shows up fast and often. In New Jersey Devils history, he owns the franchise marks for career wins, losses, shutouts, games played, goals-against average and more.
On the league side, he still sits atop the NHL in career wins, shutouts and minutes played. More than a decade after his retirement, a few of those numbers look less like records and more like monuments.
The one that may never move is games played.
Brodeur logged 1,266 games and 74,438 minutes over 22 NHL seasons, a level of durability that borders on absurd in today’s game. Only four goalies in league history have reached 1,000 games played. The closest name to Brodeur in both games and minutes is Marc-Andre Fleury, who spent 21 seasons in the league but finished with 1,501 games.
The active crop isn’t close enough to make a real run. Sergei Bobrovsky is the nearest current goalie to Brodeur with 806 games played.
He’s 37 years old and has been in the league for 16 years, but he’d need 460 more games to catch Brodeur. Bobrovsky hasn’t played more than 60 games in a season since 2018-19, and getting to 1,000 before retirement looks unlikely.
Semyon Varlamov, ranked 49th on the all-time list, is in a similar position. He has 621 games across 17 NHL seasons, but at 38 and working firmly in a backup role with the New York Islanders, it’s hard to see him playing more than 20 games next season.
Connor Hellebuyck is the youngest goalie in the top 50, and even at 33 he has only 625 games. He’s still a long way from Brodeur, and the modern workload just doesn’t line up with what Brodeur used to handle.
Last season, Vejmelka led the NHL with 69 games played. Brodeur regularly had seasons above 70.
Teams simply divide the net more now than they did then, and that alone makes the games-played record feel locked in.
The shutout record looks just as sturdy.
Brodeur finished with 125 shutouts, which leaves him well ahead of Terry Sawchuk’s 103. Bobrovsky again leads the active goalies with 53, meaning he would need 72 more to get there.
His best season for shutouts is nine. Hellebuyck has 45, so he’d need 80 more, which would mean averaging eight a year for another 10 seasons and playing until 43, one year longer than Brodeur did.
Andrei Vasilevskiy would be in a similar spot.
What keeps that record so far out in front is the way the NHL has changed. Brodeur spent much of his career in the dead puck era, when scoring was lower than it is now. Add in elite goaltending and strong defense, and 125 shutouts starts to look like the kind of number the league may never see again.
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