The National Hockey League announced on Apr. 29 that New York Islanders goaltender Ilya Sorokin is a finalist for the 2026 Vezina Trophy, which is awarded annually to the league’s top goaltender and selected by the NHL’s 32 general managers.
Sorokin is one of three finalists for this year’s award, joining Jeremy Swayman of the Boston Bruins and Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
During his sixth NHL season, Sorokin led all goaltenders with seven shutouts and recorded a 29-24-2 record. He posted a .906 save percentage and a goals-against average of 2.68 over 55 games (54 starts). Among goalies with at least 50 appearances, his save percentage ranked sixth while his goals-against average was seventh. Sorokin also led in road wins (18), ranked eighth in saves (1,386), ninth in shots against (1,530), tied for ninth in wins (29) and games played (55), and was tenth in minutes played (3,226). He topped all netminders in high-danger saves with 452 and had a high-danger save percentage of .864.
Sorokin went 15-5-0 when facing more than 30 shots during the season, including setting an Islanders franchise record by starting with a streak of thirteen consecutive wins under those conditions. His fifteen wins when facing more than thirty shots also led the league. On January 6, he made forty-four saves during a shutout performance—the most by any NHL goalie in such a game this season—which marked his twenty-sixth career shutout and broke an Islanders all-time record that had stood nearly fifty years. His seven shutouts tied him for most by an Islander goaltender in one season.
He was named the NHL’s “First Star of the Week” for the period ending December 7 after playing fourteen consecutive games from March 17 to April 12—including nine straight starts—and four back-to-back sets.
Sorokin is now the first Islanders goalie to receive multiple nominations as a Vezina Trophy finalist. This marks only the sixth time an Islanders netminder has been named among finalists for this award; previous honorees include Billy Smith (1982), Roland Melanson (1983), Kelly Hrudey (1988), Robin Lehner (2019), and himself previously in 2023. Of these players, only Smith has won it.
Before joining New York, Sorokin spent eight seasons playing professionally in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League with CSKA Moscow and Metallurg Novokuznetsk where he recorded strong statistics—a goals-against average of just over one point seven zero across two hundred forty-four regular-season starts—and earned gold at Pyeongchang’s Winter Olympics as part of Olympic Athletes from Russia team.
The Islanders selected Sorokin as their third-round pick—seventy-eighth overall—in the two thousand fourteen NHL Draft.
