Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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31

Anton Forsberg

Ottawa Senators Goaltender

A .9170 across 1,457 shots, from a seventh-round pick who had been a .9023 goaltender across the 1,536 before it.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2014-15CBJ5040204.690149.866
2015-16CBJ413093.03097.907
2016-17CBJ101044.10027.852
2017-18CHI3510164852.970921.908
2019-20CAR311083.35078.897
2020-21OTT8341243.210264.909
2021-22OTT46221741212.8211457.917
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—102374692713.0312993.909

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

46 games, 22-17-4, a .9170 save percentage and a 2.82 goals-against, one shutout on 1,457 shots. That is 10th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games.

One hundred and eighty-eighth overall in 2011 — the last round — and 102 NHL games across seven seasons with four clubs.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 200 pounds, which is the modern build for the position.

The career splits into two halves and they do not agree. Before last season he had faced 1,536 NHL shots across six years and stopped 90.23 per cent of them, with a best of .9091 in eight games. Last season he faced 1,457 and stopped 91.70 per cent.

A hundred and forty-seven points of improvement, on samples of almost exactly the same size. Career .9095 across 2,993 shots.

That is the whole question about him and the record cannot settle it: either the first 1,536 shots were a goaltender who had not yet arrived, or the second 1,457 were a season.

The Mental Game

Ottawa rated 15th in the league in goaltending at plus-0.4 goals saved above expectation — almost exactly nothing — while he was posting the 10th-best save percentage in hockey.

The reason is the other thirty-six games. Matt Murray took twenty at .9063 and has gone to Toronto; Filip Gustavsson eighteen at .8920 and has gone to Minnesota; Mads Sogaard two at .8889.

The club figure is three goaltenders and his is one of them.

The skaters in front of him finished 21st in attempt share, 23rd in chance share and 26th in expected goals against per 60 at even strength, and the penalty kill finished 28th at 5:08 a game.

The Intangibles

He is 29 with 102 NHL games and had never been anybody’s first choice for a full season before this one.

Nothing here measures how he plays a rebound or finds a puck through traffic. What it measures is one very good season of 1,457 shots sitting on top of six ordinary ones of 1,536, and a club that has now traded away both of its other goaltenders and brought in Cam Talbot.

That is a club saying it does not know either.