Cossa, Postava win Holmes Award as Griffins post league-best defense

Grand Rapids’ crease is carrying the Griffins into the Calder Cup Playoffs with a trophy to prove it. Sebastian Cossa and Michal Postava won the Harry “Hap” Holmes Memorial Award on April 19 after helping the Griffins allow a league-low 159 goals, just 2.21 per game, and giving the club a postseason weapon that few AHL teams can match.

The Holmes Award, presented since 1972 to the goaltender or goaltenders on the team that allows the fewest goals per game in the regular season, requires each goalie to appear in at least one-third of his team’s games. That qualification rule makes this a true tandem honor, and Grand Rapids earned it with depth as much as star power. The Griffins used five goaltenders over the course of the season, including Carter Gylander, Dustin Tokarski and Trey Augustine, but Cossa and Postava did the heavy lifting that pushed the club to the top of the league.

Cossa’s season alone would have put him in the award conversation. The Detroit Red Wings’ 2021 first-round pick, No. 15 overall, went 26-8-4 in 38 games with a 2.28 goals-against average, a .917 save percentage and five shutouts. He gave Grand Rapids the recognizable name and the NHL pedigree, and he backed it up with the kind of reliability teams need when the schedule tightens and every mistake becomes magnified.

Postava supplied the other half of the formula, and his path gave the Griffins unusual flexibility. The Czech rookie was recalled by Detroit under emergency conditions on March 26, then reassigned to Grand Rapids three days later. At the time of that move back to the AHL, he was 13-6-0 with a 1.86 goals-against average and a .932 save percentage in 20 games. He finished the year at 15-6-0 with a 1.78 goals-against average, a .935 save percentage and three shutouts in 23 games, never allowing more than three goals in any outing.

That combination mattered in a league where a short series can turn on one hot goalie or one bad stretch. Grand Rapids became the first team to clinch a berth in the 2026 Calder Cup Playoffs, doing it with 20 games and 51 days still left in the regular season. The Holmes Award now confirms what the standings already suggested: the Griffins’ safest path through the postseason starts with a two-goalie setup built to absorb pressure, manage workload and survive the series swings that define AHL hockey.

For Grand Rapids, it is also history repeating. This is the franchise’s third Holmes Award and first since back-to-back wins in 2001-02 and 2002-03, a reminder that the organization’s best playoff teams have often begun with the same thing the current club has now: a crease that can change a series.