Connor Hellebuyck has beaten the Toronto Maple Leafs plenty of times. He had never shut them out, and by the end of last season that had become the oddest line in his record: 24 games, eleven seasons, not one clean sheet.
Game 25 was a 4-0 win at Scotiabank Arena on Sunday. It was also the 350th victory of his career, and his first regular-season shutout in 63 games.
The one team he could never blank
Through the end of 2025-26, Hellebuyck had faced 14 opponents at least 20 times and shut out 13. Toronto was the exception: 24 games, nothing, and a .904 save percentage that was the worst he had managed against any club in that group.
The next-thinnest lines belong to Dallas and Montreal, and he had blanked each of them once in more than 30 meetings. Toronto stood alone on zero.
Gaps like that tend to stay open. A goaltender who has played a team 24 times has usually caught them on a bad night somewhere along the way, and the fact that he never had was the strangest quiet entry in his record against every NHL team. It closed in his first season away from Winnipeg, on his first visit to Toronto as a Devil.
Anthony Stolarz made 25 saves at the other end, two more than Hellebuyck, and lost 4-0. Timo Meier scored twice in the second period, Nico Hischier added a power-play goal and an assist to reach 500 career points, and Connor Brown put the last one into an empty net.
How many career wins does Connor Hellebuyck have?
350. He closed 2025-26 on 345 and has won all five of his starts for New Jersey. That puts him 27th in NHL history. 26 goaltenders have won more, led by Martin Brodeur’s 691, and the two directly above him, Evgeni Nabokov and Rogie Vachon, sit together at 353 — close enough to pass this month. Brodeur’s number is a different kind of object altogether, built across 1,266 games. Hellebuyck got to 350 in 630.
Further up that list is Patrick Roy’s record against every team, held by the third-winningest goaltender ever.
Sixty-three games without a clean sheet
His previous regular-season shutout came on 10 April 2025, a 25-save, 4-0 win in Dallas. It was his eighth of that season and his 45th win, both Winnipeg records, in the year he swept the Hart Trophy, the Vezina and the Jennings.
Then it stopped. Two games closed out 2024-25. All 57 of his 2025-26 appearances went by without one, in a season he finished 23-23-11 with a .895 save percentage and an empty shutout column. Four more came and went for New Jersey. 63 regular-season games separated his last clean sheet from this one, which arrived in the 64th.
That 63 is a regular-season count. His last shutout of any kind was more recent, with two in the 2025 playoffs, both against Dallas, on 9 and 15 May. Counting the postseason, the gap was 62.
Toronto was the 46th shutout of his career.
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