Aaron Dell
San Jose Sharks Goaltender
A .8927 across twelve games, on a career that has ranged from .9306 to .8571.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | SJS | 20 | 11 | 6 | 1 | 37 | 2.00 | 1 | 533 | .931 |
| 2017-18 | SJS | 29 | 15 | 5 | 4 | 67 | 2.64 | 2 | 775 | .913 |
| 2018-19 | SJS | 25 | 10 | 8 | 4 | 70 | 3.17 | 2 | 613 | .886 |
| 2019-20 | SJS | 33 | 12 | 15 | 3 | 92 | 3.01 | 0 | 986 | .907 |
| 2020-21 | NJD | 7 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 22 | 4.14 | 0 | 154 | .857 |
| 2021-22 | BUF | 12 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 38 | 4.03 | 0 | 354 | .893 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 126 | 50 | 47 | 13 | 326 | 2.93 | 5 | 3415 | .904 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
12 games for Buffalo, 1-8-1, a .8927 save percentage and a 4.03 goals-against, no shutouts on 354 shots. Undrafted, and 126 NHL games and 3,415 shots across six seasons out of it.
Twelve games is half the twenty-five this book requires before it will place a goaltender in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 213 pounds, and 33 years old.
The career is the least stable in this batch. .9306 across 533 shots as a 27-year-old rookie in San Jose. .9135 across 775. .8858 across 613. .9067 across 986. .8571 across 154 in New Jersey. .8927 across 354 in Buffalo.
Seven hundred and thirty-five points of range across six seasons, and the trend runs one way: the two best years are the first two and the three worst have all come since 2018.
Career .9045 across 3,415 shots.
The Mental Game
Buffalo rated 28th in the league in goaltending at minus-26.5, and the crease also carried Craig Anderson at .8974 and Dustin Tokarski at .8989. His twelve games were the worst of the three.
One win in twelve appearances. The skaters in front finished 20th in attempt share and 26th in chances, which is a poor structure and not an alibi for a .8927.
He returns to the organisation where his two best seasons happened, and to a club that finished 31st in attempt share and 20th in goaltending.
The Intangibles
Nothing in the file speaks to technique, and 354 shots would not settle it if it did.
What it measures is a six-season decline in a straight line, from a .9306 rookie year to three consecutive seasons below .9070.
James Reimer is 34 with 433 games and Kaapo Kahkonen 26 with sixty-five. A 33-year-old at .9045 with three declining seasons behind him is the third goaltender on this depth chart, and the record gives no reason to expect he will be more.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
“Undrafted, and 126 NHL games and 3,415 shots across six seasons out of it.”