Maple Leafs select goaltender Timofei Obvintsev with 157th overall pick of 2024 NHL Draft

The Toronto Maple Leafs have selected goaltender Timofei Obvintsev from Krasnaya Armiya Moskva with the 157th pick of the 2024 NHL Draft.

It was their third of three picks in the fifth round of the draft, selecting Czechia forward Miroslav Holinka with the 151st pick and Russian forward Alexander Plesovskikh with the 152nd pick. He was not ranked by NHL Central Scouting, and little information about him is out there.

A native of Yekaterinburg, Russia, Obvintsev appeared in 16 games for Krasnaya and finished the season with a record of 7-7-0 to go along with a goals-against average of 2.96 and a .921 save percentage. He is set to return to his junior team for the 2024-25 season, indicating a clear project pick for the Maple Leafs. DFO Prospect Analyst Steven Ellis had this to say about the selection.

At 19 years old, he’s a year older than most of his draft counterparts, but there isn’t any pressure on him to come into the Leafs’ organization and start NHL games anytime soon. He joins a particularly busy pool of goaltender prospects, led by 2022 fifth-round pick Dennis Hildeby, 2020 fourth-round pick Artur Akhtyamov, who recently announced his intention to come to North America, and 2021 sixth-round pick Vyacheslav Peksa.

He has good size at 6-foot-4, and again, when you’re this deep into the draft, it will never be a bad thing to select a goaltender and hope for the best. It sounds cliche, but the more shots you have, the more of a chance you have at selecting the next Ilya Sorokin or Igor Shesterkin. It’s already worked to an extent with the Leafs, with reports that they’ve signed 2016 third-round pick Joseph Woll to a three-year extension. Woll is presumably expected to be the Maple Leafs’ starter next year, showing how valuable these gambles on goaltenders in the middle rounds can be.

At any rate, Obvintsev will continue his development in Russia next season and likely for the foreseeable future.