BUFFALO, N.Y. — Alex Lyon is 32 and is in his 10th season of professional hockey. So the Buffalo Sabres’ new starting goalie has accumulated plenty of wisdom and dealt with a career’s worth of adversity. But he insists what’s different about this chance he’s getting in Buffalo isn’t everything he’s put into his brain over the last 10 years, but more about what he’s let out.
“It’s not even like I’m more prepared for the opportunity,” Lyon said this week after practice. “It’s just that there’s a level of healthy apathy if that makes sense. You can just deal with situations as they come. I don’t know the right way to delicately say it, but I think you know what I’m saying.”
Lyon, of course, cares about stopping pucks. He’s just found a way to be apathetic about the outcomes while caring intensely about the process. When he was younger, Lyon might have been worried about his stats, or his standing on the organizational depth chart or his next contract. He felt the weight of the world with each start.
Age has stripped that type of thinking away. He knows who he is.
“My mindset here is I want the Buffalo Sabres to win,” Lyon said. “However I can contribute to that is how I’m going to do it, whether it be grinding in practice or playing a lot of games. That’s just my fate in the NHL. Every player wants to be a $10 million, Stanley Cup, Vezina-winning player, but at this point in my career, I just find a lot of fulfillment in making the team as successful as possible. That’s my thought process.”
You wouldn’t use apathetic to describe Lyon’s play in the crease. He plays the position with an intensity and focus that radiates throughout the team. That’s what has helped him start the season with a 2.90 goals-against average and a .912 save percentage. He’s played nine of the Sabres’ 11 games as Lindy Ruff is leaning on him like an unquestioned starter.
When the Sabres signed Lyon to a two-year contract worth $1.5 million per year, they didn’t necessarily envision this. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen was the presumed starter, but he needed a veteran backup to provide competition. An injury to Luukkonen opened the door for Lyon to take the job. And it wasn’t until Thursday, in his ninth start, that Lyon had a down game. He allowed four goals on 22 shots. That will raise questions about Buffalo’s need to manage his workload and whether he can maintain the level of play he had in his first eight games.
Lyon becoming a top-end starting goalie for the Sabres at 32 would make him an outlier in NHL history. He made the NHL as an undrafted college free agent after three years at Yale. He’s started more than 30 games just once in his career. In 2023-24, he had 43 starts for the Red Wings. That year, he had a .904 save percentage and 3.05 goals-against average and ranked 34th in goals saved above expected. Those numbers were right around league average. But as Dom Luszczyszyn noted in his power rankings this week, Lyon is one of nine goalies with an above-average GSAx in each of the last four seasons. The others on that list are Connor Hellebuyck, Igor Shesterkin, Jake Oettinger, Sergei Bobrovsky, Frederik Andersen, Lukáš Dostál, Anthony Stolarz and Stuart Skinner. That’s good company to keep.
So Lyon’s early-season performance is something he has been building toward. And it provides a glimmer of hope that he could be something more than league average for the Sabres. Finding NHL goalies who broke out after 30 is rare. Tim Thomas became a full-time starter for the Bruins at 31 and had his true breakout season at 32. He’s probably the best example of what Lyon is attempting to accomplish. A more recent comparable would be Stolarz. Last season, at 30, Stolarz made a career-high 33 starts for the Maple Leafs and posted a 2.14 goals-against average and .926 save percentage while earning playoff starts.
It’s fitting that Lyon is trying to follow in Stolarz’s footsteps, because the two spent years toiling away in the minors as a goalie tandem for the Lehigh Valley Phantoms in the Philadelphia Flyers organization. Now both are making a mark elsewhere, while the Flyers’ top-performing goalie is Dan Vladar, a 28-year-old who is on his third NHL team.
That’s the state of goaltending for much of the NHL. Outside of a handful of elite goaltenders, the position tends to have an alarming turnover rate across the league. Lyon started the first game of the playoffs for the Florida Panthers in the spring of 2023 and is now on his second team since then. Of the 17 goalies who started five or more games in the playoffs last season, only six are with the same team that drafted them.
Buffalo’s current goalie situation is a microcosm of the uncertainty of the position. Luukkonen, 26, was a second-round pick in 2017 who has struggled to find consistency since signing a five-year contract worth $4.75 million per year. Highly touted prospect Devon Levi, 23, is in the minors after the team twice tried to rush him to the NHL. Colten Ellis, a 25-year-old who made his NHL debut last week, was drafted by the Blues in the third round in 2019 and came to Buffalo as a waiver claim just before the start of the season. They even have Alexandar Georgiev, who played in the NHL All-Star Game in 2024, in the AHL as well. And it’s Lyon, the 32-year-old who came into this season with 100 career starts, who has emerged as the go-to guy.
Everyone agrees that goalies take longer to develop, but not a lot of teams are willing to invest the time or patience necessary to see that development process through. For a position that is arguably as important to the success of a team as the quarterback is to football, hockey general managers treat it more like NFL teams treat running backs.
“I feel like sometimes teams give up on goalies too soon,” said Red Wings goalie Cam Talbot, a two-time All-Star who is on his eighth team and didn’t make his first All-Star game until he was 35. “If things aren’t going the right way, they just plug another guy in there and see how it works out.”
That’s been the story of Talbot’s career. And for a while, he played with that reality at the front of his mind. When he was with the Rangers, he played every game like he could get sent down to the minors until a goalie coach pulled him aside and told him they didn’t need him to be Henrik Lundqvist.
It wasn’t until the next year, when he got to Edmonton, that Talbot started to feel his career settle down. Still, it was hard to escape the reality that you’re one bad season away from a team looking for your replacement. By then, Talbot was in his late 20s and already could feel a world of difference in terms of how he handled the reality of the position.
“The biggest thing is knowing yourself as a person,” Talbot said. “Everyone has a different path. I didn’t make the NHL until I was 26. Goalies develop later, and you can’t rush it unless there’s some sort of prodigy. I feel like you need time to develop.”
The tricky part is surviving in the league long enough to get the necessary time to develop. That’s why when Lyon talks about that apathy that he’s developed, he doesn’t think he could have rushed that.
“It’s something I wasn’t born with,” Lyon said. “But worrying so much and caring so much about every start is also what got me to this point and what gets a lot of guys to the NHL. But then it’s an interesting dynamic because once you get here, you have to learn how to play your game, fit in with everybody else’s, and you can’t get tied into the ups and downs.”
Talbot played with Lyon in Detroit and thinks a big reason he’s stuck around is the way he works and the type of person he is in the locker room. The backup goalie can’t afford to be anything but a consummate teammate.
“If you’re bumping around to different teams and stuff like that, no one wants an asshole coming into the room and ruining the chemistry,” Talbot said. “If you can be a good teammate and slide into any room, those guys are going to want to play for you. You want guys to rally around you and play for you and in front of you and not just with you.”
Lyon has been that player for the Sabres. At 32, he’s one of the veterans in the locker room and has found a way to lead in his own way. Ruff said goalies aren’t often vocal, but Lyon has already established himself as someone who isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
“He’s been around teams where he just understands if we’re going to get to point B, we have to do this, this and this and do it on a consistent basis,” Ruff said. “I’ve liked him in the room.”
That part is important to Lyon. You can also feel his intensity on a game day, before, during and after the game. You hear a lot of players talk about goalies being in their own world. Lyon doesn’t operate that way. His first love is football. He played on the offensive and defensive line for Lake of the Woods High School, a tiny school on the northern border of Minnesota. That’s where he learned to play sports with emotion.
“I think it’s a big mistake for young goalies to think that they’re playing an isolated position,” Lyon said. “I think goalie coaching in 2025 pushes guys that way, where it’s like just play your game, just do your thing, and it’s isolated. But you’re also playing with the team. It’s a completely different position, but you’re still tied in with the emotions, working toward a common goal.”
Lyon has had different goalie coaches along the way tell him to tone down the emotional side of his game, but at some point in his decade in pro hockey, he realized that advice wasn’t for him. Maybe that’s part of that healthy apathy, not taking all criticism and feedback to heart. Because that intensity is part of what has helped him stick around this long, as much as any technical improvements he’s made in his game.
“You have to find ways to stick around in the league and make the strengths you have your strengths,” Lyon said. “That’s something I try to do. I’m not always successful at it because it is really hard when you don’t have confidence in your game. It’s hard to project that. I think it’s a lot like being a doctor. Do you want your doctor in the room like, ‘We’re going to get this done, we’re going to go, it’s time.’ Or do you want a doctor who is isolated in their own world? That confidence projects. I try to bring that emotional intensity.”