This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Anthony Stolarz
Anaheim Ducks Goaltender
A .9172 in 28 games behind the same defence that had his starter at .9039 — a 6-6 career backup with 62 NHL games and a better save percentage than any of them.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | PHI | 7 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 13 | 2.07 | 1 | 181 | .928 |
| 2018-19 | PHI/EDM | 18 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 50 | 3.45 | 1 | 503 | .901 |
| 2019-20 | ANA | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 2.04 | 0 | 36 | .944 |
| 2020-21 | ANA | 8 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 17 | 2.20 | 1 | 230 | .926 |
| 2021-22 | ANA | 28 | 12 | 8 | 3 | 67 | 2.67 | 3 | 809 | .917 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 62 | 22 | 18 | 7 | 149 | 2.73 | 6 | 1759 | .915 |
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
28 games, 12-8-3, a .9172 save percentage and a 2.67 goals-against average, with 3 shutouts on 809 shots faced.
Three shutouts in 28 games on a club that finished 23rd. He also won twelve of them, which is better than a third of everything Anaheim won all season.
The comparison is the whole report. John Gibson played 56 games behind the same defence and posted a .9039. Stolarz was thirteen points of save percentage better in the same crease in the same season. 809 shots is not a full sample and a backup gets a kinder schedule, and it is still the only controlled comparison available.
His career line is a .9153 across 62 games and six seasons — every one of them as somebody’s second or third goaltender.
The Physical Game
6-6 and 248, and the size is the method: he takes away the bottom of the net by standing up in it. There is very little scrambling and there is not much lateral quickness either; he wins by being in the right place and being enormous when he gets there.
The puckhandling is the weak part and always has been. On a club whose defencemen are already under pressure on retrievals, a goaltender who cannot help them is a real cost, and it is a cost Anaheim paid all season.
The Mental Game
Knee surgery cost him the better part of two seasons and he has never played thirty games in one. Five NHL seasons and 62 games is the record of a man who has spent his career waiting for a run of health and a run of starts to arrive at the same time, and last season was the closest he has come.
Twenty-eight games is also, on this evidence, roughly the number he should play. The save percentage held; nobody knows what the fiftieth start looks like because nobody has seen one.
The Intangibles
Forty-fifth overall in 2012 by Philadelphia, and the years since spent as a backup in three organisations.
He is 28, and Anaheim has a starter it is paying to be a starter. The season only becomes interesting if Gibson is hurt or traded, and in a rebuild both of those are more likely than they sound — at which point the club finds out whether a .9172 over 28 games was the goaltender or the schedule.
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.
“6-6 and 248, and the size is the method: he takes away the bottom of the net by standing up in it”