Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2022-23 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 2022-23 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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33

Alex Nedeljkovic

Detroit Red Wings Goaltender

A .9009 across 59 games and 1,796 shots — 39th of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 or more.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2016-17CAR100000.000171.000
2018-19CAR110022.00026.923
2019-20CAR4121113.05097.887
2020-21CAR231553441.903648.932
2021-22DET59202491783.3141796.901
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—883731132352.8672584.909

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

59 games, 20-24-9, .9009 and 3.31 with four shutouts on 1,796 shots. Thirty-ninth of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more.

1,796 shots is the sixth-heaviest workload in the league last season and it came behind a club that allowed the second-worst rate of expected goals against at even strength.

Detroit’s goaltending as a whole came in 25th at minus-14 goals against the chances faced. He is most of that figure, and the club in front of him is most of the reason it is not worse.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 205, which is small by the standard the position now sets — one of nine goaltenders in this book at six feet or under.

Nothing here measures rebound control, lateral push or how deep he plays. What the repo has is shots and goals: .9009 on 1,796 shots is a genuinely large sample and a genuinely poor number.

The one thing the counting stats do carry is the puck-handling, indirectly — four shutouts on a club that conceded 312 goals is an odd pair of facts, and it is the shape of a goaltender who has very good nights and very bad ones.

The Mental Game

Twenty-six years old, and the record has one very good season in it. He went .9321 on 648 shots for Carolina in 2020-21, and then .9009 on nearly three times the volume.

The larger sample is the worse one. That is the single most important sentence about him and it points the wrong way: a .9321 on 648 shots is what a goaltender does in a good half-season behind a good club, and 1,796 shots behind a bad one is closer to what he is.

The Intangibles

Thirty-seventh overall in 2014, the second round, and 88 NHL games at 26 with a career .9091.

Four seasons of one, one, four and twenty-three games before last year’s fifty-nine. He was 25 before he had played thirty NHL games.

Detroit has signed Ville Husso to take the net. The job here is twenty-five starts and the argument for keeping him is that the .9321 happened, which is 648 shots against 1,796 that say otherwise.

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.

  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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.

  • puck-handlingpresent and ordinary· starts the breakout himself

    “four shutouts on a club that conceded 312 goals is an odd pair of facts”

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “Nothing here measures rebound control, lateral push or how deep he plays.”