Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2023-24 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2023-24 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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40

Akira Schmid

New Jersey Devils Goaltender

Six-foot-five, eighteen games, and a save percentage a hundred points above the man ahead of him.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2021-22NJD6040194.830114.833
2022-23NJD18952322.131408.922
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—24992512.691522.902

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

9-5-2 in 18 games, .9216, 2.13, one shutout on 408 shots.

A .9216 against Vanecek’s .9107 in a third of the appearances, and a 2.13 goals-against average that would have been among the best in the league at any volume.

Eighteen games is eighteen games, and this book will not pretend otherwise: 408 shots is a sample in which a save percentage moves twenty points on four pucks. What it does establish is that the club can play him and win.

Two seasons, 24 NHL games.

The Finesse Game

6-5 and 190 pounds, which is the modern shape of the position taken about as far as it goes.

The size does the work. He plays deep in the crease and lets the net fill itself, and against the clean shot from distance — which is most of what New Jersey concedes — there is very little to beat.

Where the height costs him is low and lateral. Getting down and across is slower for a 6-5 goaltender than for a 6-0 one, and the goals in this small sample came from the second and third chance rather than the first.

He tracks the puck through screens well for a young goaltender, which is the specific skill that decides whether size is an asset or a place to hide.

The Intangibles

One hundred and thirty-sixth overall in 2018, the fifth round, out of Bern — one of four Swiss players on this roster, with Hischier, Meier and Siegenthaler.

He is twenty-three with 24 NHL games, behind a goaltender who has never been unseated and in front of nobody.

The honest projection is that eighteen good games decide nothing and that the club is right to have him here anyway. A 6-5 goaltender who can track through traffic at twenty-three is worth several seasons of finding out.

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
  • he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He plays deep in the crease and lets the net fill itself, and against the clean shot from distance — which is most of what New Jersey concedes — there is very little to beat.”

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “He tracks the puck through screens well for a young goaltender, which is the specific skill that decides whether size is an asset or a place to hide.”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “Getting down and across is slower for a 6-5 goaltender than for a 6-0 one, and the goals in this small sample came from the second and third chance rather than the first.”