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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40

Alexandar Georgiev

Colorado Avalanche Goaltender

A .8978 in 33 games behind the 2nd-best goaltending club in the league — arriving to replace a Stanley Cup winner.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2017-18NYR10441273.150331.918
2018-19NYR3314134912.9121057.914
2019-20NYR3417142963.0421063.910
2020-21NYR19872442.712465.905
2021-22NYR3315102852.922832.898
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—1295848113432.9483748.908

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

33 games, 15-10-2, a .8978 save percentage and a 2.92 goals-against average for the Rangers, with 2 shutouts on 832 shots faced. He arrived here in the summer.

New York’s goaltending finished 23.4 goals ahead of the chances it faced, 2nd in the league — and almost all of it was Igor Shesterkin, who posted a .9346 in 53 games. Georgiev’s .8978 is 37 points of save percentage below his partner’s, in the same crease behind the same team.

That comparison is the single most important thing on this page, and it is not flattering.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 178, which is small for a modern goaltender, and the method matches: he is quick and reactive rather than large and square, and he relies on getting across rather than on taking away the angle before the shot.

Five seasons and 129 games, a career .9085. The .8978 is the second-worst of them; the .9139 he posted across 33 games in 2018-19 is the best of the four he has played at any length.

The Mental Game

Five years as Igor Shesterkin’s and Henrik Lundqvist’s backup, thirty-three games at a time, and never a season as anybody’s starter.

Colorado has traded Darcy Kuemper to Washington and handed the crease to a man with 129 NHL games and a career .9085. That is a considerable act of faith by a club that just won a Stanley Cup, and nothing in the measured record explains it.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Bulgaria by way of the Swedish and Finnish leagues, and 129 NHL games at 26.

Colorado’s goaltending finished exactly level with the chances it faced last season, 16th in the league — the champion had precisely average goaltending. It has now replaced average with a career backup, on a club whose defence is excellent and whose chance share was 11th. The crease is the largest open question about the defending champion.

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
  • 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.

  • undraftedpresent and ordinary· arrived without a pick attached

    “Undrafted, out of Bulgaria by way of the Swedish and Finnish leagues, and 129 NHL games at 26.”

  • lateral-recoverya strength· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “he is quick and reactive rather than large and square, and he relies on getting across rather than on taking away the angle before the shot”