PITTSBURGH — He gave up a short-handed goal on a misread puck in the opening minutes of Game Four. Then he stopped 32 of the next 34 shots and won. That is, roughly speaking, the Sergei Murashov experience: a flaw visible enough to give you pause, followed immediately by the kind of performance that makes the pause seem small.
The 22-year-old from Yaroslavl is now the most certain thing about the Pittsburgh Penguins’ goaltending situation heading into 2026-27 — which is a strange sentence to write about a player who has yet to start a full NHL season. Russian goaltenders crossing from the KHL to North American hockey have had varying transitions. Murashov’s has been unusually clean, and the numbers that have accumulated since he arrived stateside in 2024 are no longer a sample-size curiosity. They are a record.
In the regular season with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Murashov went 24-9-4 with a 2.20 goals-against average and a .919 save percentage — third in the AHL in both categories. Through twelve games in the Calder Cup Playoffs, he has held that mark below two goals against per game and posted a .936 save percentage. The AHL Penguins are currently in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Toronto Marlies, and Murashov is the reason they are there.
The Pittsburgh Penguins, meanwhile, have a more complicated situation at the NHL level. Both goaltenders who finished the 2025-26 season with the team are off the books. Stuart Skinner, the 27-year-old acquired from Edmonton in December alongside defenseman Brett Kulak, is an unrestricted free agent when July 1 arrives. Arturs Silovs, whose two-year entry-level deal at $850,000 per season expires this summer, is a restricted free agent — but with a .888 save percentage and a goals-saved-above-expected of minus-11.9, his NHL value is best described as complicated.
The organization’s read, per Josh Yohe of The Athletic, is that Murashov is ready to be the team’s primary NHL goaltender next season. He has $886,110 left on his entry-level deal through 2026-27, when he becomes a restricted free agent. The math on his cost alone would make him the obvious answer. But whether Dubas simply hands Murashov the crease, pairs him with a veteran at a significant number, or trades Silovs’ rights while they carry value — none of that has been settled.
What is settled is the underlying evaluation. Murashov earned AHL Goalie of the Month in October during his first fully North American season, went 5-1 in six starts to open that run, and then held the number in every phase that followed. He was named to the AHL All-Star Classic in February, finished the regular season third in the league in both goals-against average and save percentage, and has now played twelve playoff games without a collapse. Last November, in his first NHL start, he stopped 24 of 27 shots against the Kings and lost a 3-2 game that was not on him. A week later in Stockholm, he blanked Nashville for 21 shots and his first career NHL win, becoming just the second Penguin ever to record a shutout as his first NHL victory.
Those five NHL games — a 2.56 goals-against average, enough to lead the team among goalies who started — were not the whole story. The whole story is what happened when he was sent back down after each stint: he did not slump, did not look distracted, and continued posting numbers that made the hockey operations staff increasingly uncomfortable about leaving him in Wilkes-Barre any longer than necessary.
The Penguins finished 41-25-16 last season, second in the Metropolitan Division, reaching the first round of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs before falling to the Flyers in six games. Sidney Crosby led the team with 74 points. Erik Karlsson added 51 assists. The core that carried Pittsburgh back into contention after several lean years remains, and Dubas has approximately $37.8 million in cap space to work with this offseason. Goaltending is the first decision.
The case for Silovs is narrow but not nothing. He salvaged a .939 save percentage in the playoffs — second-best in the entire postseason — before the Flyers ended Pittsburgh’s season with one goal in Game 6. The case for Skinner is locker-room culture and playoff experience, which the organization valued enough to make the December trade. Neither case is strong enough on its own to displace the organizational conclusion about Murashov.
What remains genuinely unknown is the surrounding structure. A 22-year-old starting goaltender who has played five NHL games is not a finished product, and no one in Pittsburgh is pretending otherwise. The question of who backs him up — and what that costs against a cap that has legitimate uses elsewhere — is what Dubas is actually managing. Trading Silovs while his value is elevated by those playoff numbers is one option. Re-signing him cheaply as a tandem is another. Bringing Skinner back on a short extension at a market rate that has almost certainly risen from his previous $2.6 million cap hit is a third.
None of those paths resolve before July 1. In the meantime, Murashov is still playing. The Eastern Conference Finals against Toronto are tied. He gave up a bad goal early in Game Four and then, over the next fifty minutes, was the best goalie on the ice. That is, by now, what the Penguins expect.
The broader question for Pittsburgh — whether a young Russian goaltender can carry a team that still believes Crosby, Malkin, and Letang give it a legitimate playoff window — is one the front office cannot answer in a press release. It gets answered in March, or April, or whenever things get hard enough that the answer becomes obvious. Murashov’s track record says he will not flinch. How much risk the organization is willing to absorb around him is, as of now, unsettled.
