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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33

Alex Nedeljkovic

Pittsburgh Penguins Goaltender

One .9321 season in Carolina, and two below-average ones behind rebuilding clubs since.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2016-17CAR100000.000171.000
2018-19CAR110022.00026.923
2019-20CAR4121113.05097.887
2020-21CAR231553441.903648.932
2021-22DET59202491783.3141796.901
2022-23DET15572493.530466.895
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1034238152842.9673050.907

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

5-7-2 in 15 games, .8948, 3.53, no shutouts on 466 shots for Detroit.

31.1 shots a night across a fifteen-game season, which is a month of a starter’s work and should be read as one.

Six seasons, 103 games, a career .9069 and a 2.96 goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-0 and 205 pounds, which is small for a modern goaltender and makes the positioning the whole game.

He plays aggressively, well out of the crease, and takes the top of the net away by depth rather than by size. Against a clean shot that works; against lateral movement it is where the goals come from, because there is not enough of him to cover the second post.

The puck-handling is genuinely good — he plays it to the wall and behind the net as well as any backup in the league, and it was a real part of why Carolina used him.

The seasons read 1.000 on 17 shots, .9231 on 26, .8866, .9321, .9009 and .8948. The .9321 came in 23 games in Carolina and has not been approached since.

The honest reading is a backup whose one outstanding season was mostly the team in front of him, and whose two seasons since have been below average behind two rebuilding ones.

The Intangibles

Thirty-seventh overall in 2014, the second round, and six seasons across Carolina and Detroit.

103 games in six years, most of them in two of those years. He is twenty-seven, which for a goaltender is young enough that the 2020-21 season is not yet dismissible.

He arrives to compete for the backup job behind a starter who has never played sixty games. That is the most interesting fact in this file: the number of starts available is likely to be larger than the depth chart suggests.

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-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He plays aggressively, well out of the crease, and takes the top of the net away by depth rather than by size.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is genuinely good — he plays it to the wall and behind the net as well as any backup in the league, and it was a real part of why Carolina used him.”

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

    “Against a clean shot that works; against lateral movement it is where the goals come from, because there is not enough of him to cover the second post.”