With the NHL's 2024-25 regular season just getting underway, there's a temptation to overreact based on as small a sample size as it gets.

But after the NHL's first batch of game action – including Tuesday night's games, when three teams lost by a combined score of 14-8, and Wednesday night's games, when four teams lost by a combined score of 26-9 – many people are rightly concernd about the state of their netminding.

Everywhere you looked, it feels like there’s goaltending drama. In Toronto, ostensible Leafs starter Joseph Woll was hurt before he played a single second of regular-season action. In Edmonton, No. 1 netminder Stuart Skinner was pulled at the 11:08 mark of the second period Wednesday after surrendering five goals on 13 shots. In Pittsburgh that same night, starting goalie Tristan Jarry gave up six goals to the New York Rangers.

Overall, 10 goalies posted save percentages of less than .881 before Thursday's games: Colorado’s Justus Annunen (.500), Edmonton’s Skinner (.615), Colorado’s Alexandar Georgiev (.688), Vancouver’s Arturs Silovs (.769), Boston’s Joonas Korpisalo (.829), Chicago’s Petr Mrazek (.846), Pittsburgh’s Jarry (.850), Edmonton’s Calvin Pickard (.857), Buffalo’s Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen (.864) and Seattle’s Philipp Grubauer (.880) all have been disappointing to start the year.

At the other end of the spectrum, nine goalies have posted save percentages of .919 or better: they include Buffalo’s Devon Levi (.919), Utah’s Connor Ingram (.923), St. Louis’ Jordan Binnington (.938), New Jersey’s Jake Allen (.944), Toronto’s Anthony Stolarz (.963) and New Jersey’s Jacob Markstrom (.968) all looked solid. And three netminders – Montreal’s Sam Montembeault, the New York Rangers’ Igor Shesterkin and Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck all posted shutouts in their first game of the year.

For all the aforementioned teams, it's far too soon to panic. It takes time for goalies to feel out their defense corps and defensive effort from all the players in front of them. But the poor start to the season definitely registers as something to keep an eye on. And in some cases, the early struggles are going to present opportunities for their understudies if the subpar play continues.

For instance, will the Pens turn to youngster Joel Blomqvist sometime soon? Regular backup Alex Nedeljkovic is injured, so the 22-year-old Blomqvist might get more action than Pittsburgh brass imagined after putting so much stock (and so much money) in Jarry, who is under contract until 2028 at $5.375 million per season.

Elsewhere, Korpisalo’s struggles could mean Boston has to lean harder on Jeremy Swayman than they’d envisioned when they acquired Korpisalo from Ottawa this summer. The Bruins have to iron out wrinkles in their game plan, but if Korpisalo can’t put up a strong effort, they’re going to have major concerns – and a possible buyout of Korpisalo’s remaining three seasons (at $3 million per year) at the end of this season.

Would the B's entertain the idea of waiving Korpisalo, demoting him to the AHL and calling up Brandon Bussi? Stranger things have happened. But the alternative is to play Swayman more than he’s played in past years, and we all should know by now most teams prefer to split the goaltending duties as equally as possible. Asking Swayman to play 55 to 60 games – when he’s never played more than 44 games in a single season – because Korpisalo can’t be relied on could be a recipe for disappointment for Boston. But time will tell whether that becomes more of an issue in the games to come.

As you can see, the stakes are sky-high for goalies in hockey’s top league. There will always be time allotted for them to acclimate to each new season, but in many cases, the way teams and their goalies have lost thus far has to be worrisome to their coaches and management.

You can’t win a Stanley Cup at the start of the season, but with subpar netminding, you can quickly put yourself behind the eight ball and dig a hole in the standings you can’t climb out from no matter how hard you try the rest of the way.

Teams aren’t about to scramble and start trading their current starting goalies for anyone they can pry away from another team. But if this troubling play continues on for the next couple weeks, it will be highly intriguing to see how teams react to this particular type of adversity.

Related: Joseph Woll Unavailable For Game 1 Of The Maple Leafs' Season? Not Disastrous But Far From Ideal