Joshua Ravensbergen has been in the right place at the right time a couple of very important times in his life.
He and four of his friends were in the right place on the Grouse Mountain slopes in North Vancouver in February 2019 to spring into action when they saw a young kid dangling from the chairlift.
“He’s not going to be able to hold on for much longer,” they said as a nearby adult, Peter Pian, grabbed some of the out-of-bounds netting. The boys grabbed some nearby padding protecting the chairlift posts and the group worked together to stretch them out. The boys told the 8-year-old skier to kick his skis off so that he didn’t fall with them and they cushioned his landing when they caught him.
In the days after their act of heroism, the video was viewed millions of times. Then-Governor General of Canada, Julie Payette, visited them. Ravensbergen told The Athletic that they were even invited to appear on “Ellen,” and attend “some press conference” with Barack Obama.
The second time Ravensbergen was in the right place at the right time was in the fall of 2023 at training camp with the Prince George Cougars. Ravensbergen was never going to be a professional snowboarder. “I used to snowboard all the time but my length doesn’t help,” he said. “All the pro guys are kind of short because you can spin quicker.”
But he always felt he could be a professional goalie. And the right person believed in him. That person was his late goalie coach Sean Murray, who died in November 2023, the founder of Pro-Formance Goalie School in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland.
He and Murray had worked together for years but Ravensbergen had gone undrafted in the WHL Bantam Draft. Murray, who worked with the Cougars, vouched for him, helping to get him an invite to their camp.
Entering camp, Cougars head coach and general manager Mark Lamb acknowledged on a recent phone call that he had two other goalies penciled in for his team, led by returning Canucks draft pick Ty Young.
But then Ravensbergen “just outplayed everybody in camp.”
“We brought him to camp and all he’s done in my eyes since I’ve seen him is play good,” Lamb said. “He got everyone’s attention, he came to training camp, we listed him, we followed him and then we didn’t have any real expectations or anything like that at all, which is really cool in junior especially when you have someone come in and just make the team and outplay other people from honest work and honest effort. And we just thought ‘How good is that going to be for Rav to learn off of Ty Young, an NHL signed and drafted goalie with a great work ethic?’
Initially, he started as Young’s backup. Then it became more and more of a tandem. By year’s end, they split the starts evenly, with Ravensbergen, an undrafted rookie who’d begun the season as a 16-year-old and finished it as a 17-year-old, playing 38 games to the 19-year-old Young’s 37, and to a 26-4-1 record and .907 save percentage to Young’s 23-11-0 record and .903 save percentage.
When it came time to pick a starter for the playoffs, Lamb picked Ravensbergen.
Ravensbergen ran with it, going 9-2-1 with a .931 save percentage in the playoffs to lead Prince George past Spokane and Kelowna before losing in six games to Portland in the third round. His six shutouts that season were a WHL rookie record.
By year’s end, he’d gone from an undrafted unknown to viewed as a first-round talent and the top goalie prospect in the 2025 NHL Draft class.
Ravensbergen became the Cougars’ No. 1 goalie in the playoffs last season. (James Doyle / Prince George Cougars)
Before his draft year had even started, he was also the youngest goalie invited by Hockey Canada to the World Junior Summer Showcase.
A year later, as his second WHL season now wraps up, there was no tandem this time around, with Ravensbergen playing more than 50 games in his draft year for the Cougars. He also stopped 15 of 16 shots (.938) in his start in the CHL USA Prospects Challenge in November.
Today, when Lamb looks back on almost not having Ravensbergen on his team, he laughs. Ravensbergen, nicknamed Rav or Burger, never did look back, though.
“You always stay loyal but things change quick. And Younger is (a) real good goaltender but when you break it right down, even when we were going back and forth (Ravensbergen) was playing better,” Lamb said. “We even went ‘Is he just getting lucky? It’ll work itself out.’ And it did. He just turned into the No. 1 and he hasn’t looked back.”
As a young kid, Ravensbergen didn’t even play hockey, he played street hockey. On the streets of North Vancouver, he gravitated to the net. But the only gloves they had were a right-handed catcher.
After eventually asking his parents, Ken (who works for a bus company called Epic Rides) and Charlene, if he could play ice hockey, they said “Sure.” Only the goalie glove the local minor hockey program provided caught left.
After catching as a lefty early on in his minor hockey career, he never felt fully comfortable that way and eventually switched back to his road hockey origins. Today, he’s pretty unique as a southpaw — a right-catching goalie (of the 95 goalies who’ve played an NHL game so far this season, only five have caught right).
He’s also pretty unique in his size.
When he passed through the WHL draft, he was 6 feet but knew he would grow (Ken is 6-foot-4, Charlene is 5-foot-10, and one of his uncles is “like 6-foot-6 or 6-foot-7,” he said.
It wasn’t until he returned to minor hockey with the Vancouver North West Hawks that he grew a couple of inches, and then an inch in each of the two summers after that, sprouting up to his current listing of 6-foot-5.25 and 190 pounds.
Ravensbergen is now the top-ranked goalie in the 2025 class. (Eric Young / CHL)
He remains quite raw, too. Until last summer as he prepared for his NHL Draft year, he’d never actually spent a full summer skating and training. Last summer, he then joined Kaivo Hockey, a local development skate run by Seattle Kraken development consultant Justin Rai, taking shots all summer from players such as Connor Bedard, Kent Johnson and Andrew Cristall.
“I never did anything like that before,” he said.
He’s still never had a dedicated summer in the gym because he spent most of last summer working with his physio to deal with what he called “hip problems” that cropped up during his heavier-than-expected workload as a rookie with the Cougars.
Lamb said the hip problems are “not a problem” and that they had more to do with maintenance and a kid who was still “learning to do stuff before you get in the goal and learning how to stretch.”
“All of the stuff was so new to him with the gym and all that and now he’s like a pro. He’s in the gym, he’s a sponge, and he wants to get better,” Lamb said. “I don’t want to use the word immature because they’re all just so young but he was maybe a little naive. When he first came here he didn’t even realize that we supplied stuff for him like socks and so he was really naive to a lot of the things that he has done because he’d just never seen them before. More than any other kid that I’ve experienced.”
Lamb also believes that timing played a role in Ravensbergen flying under the radar earlier in his career, though, too.
“It was the COVID year so that’s maybe kind of why he went through the cracks a little bit and he wasn’t drafted,” Lamb said. “And then it was just all progression and it was all on him and it just became a real good story for the Prince George Cougars.”
Ravensbergen was excellent in net in November’s CHL USA Top Prospect Game. (Eric Young / CHL)
When Ravensbergen looks back, he shakes his head a little at how far he’s come in such a short time.
“I signed but I think they kind of lied to me too because the scouting director was like ‘If you sign you’re on the team’ and then I showed up to camp and I almost didn’t make preseason, which is wild to think about,” Ravensbergen said.
He’s no secret anymore, though, and the talent is undeniable.
“He has a huge pro presence and plays big even when down in the butterfly with excellent low net coverage,” reads NHL Central Scouting’s scouting report (they’ve ranked him No. 1 among North American goalies). “He plays with a lot of confidence and moves extremely well throughout the crease with very good structure in his game. Utilizes quick reactions and recovery skills and has an excellent glove hand. He tracks the puck well through traffic — strong in tight and on the post, quick to eliminate any holes. A combination of size and ability, he has a good chance to become an NHL starter. A top-end goalie talent for the 2025 NHL Draft.”
Lamb goes as far as to call him “Carey Price-like” because “everything in the crease just seems so natural” to him.
“He’s just so smooth. He has quickness for a big guy. He really reads the plays. How he moves in there for his size is incredible,” Lamb finished. “He’s a skinny, lean kid but his work ethic is really high-end. And he’s not cocky but he’s very competitive.
“He’ll be a real good goalie for somebody.”
— With reporting in Plymouth, Mich., and London and Oshawa, Ont.
(Top photo: Eric Young / CHL)
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