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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32

Antti Raanta

Carolina Hurricanes Goaltender

A .9122 in 28 games, a career .9187 across 226, and a body that has never once given him a full season.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2013-14CHI251354632.711610.897
2014-15CHI14741251.892389.936
2015-16NYR251162432.241530.919
2016-17NYR301682612.264782.922
2017-18ARI4721176972.2431388.930
2018-19ARI12560332.880351.906
2019-20ARI3315143802.6321014.921
2020-21ARI12552383.360401.905
2021-22CAR281554622.452706.912
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—22610870245022.46156171.919

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, 15-5-4, a .9122 save percentage and a 2.45 goals-against average, with 2 shutouts on 706 shots faced.

Twenty-eight games is the fourth time in six seasons he has played fewer than thirty, and he has never played more than 47 in a year.

Carolina’s goaltending finished 18.7 goals ahead of the chances it faced, 4th in the league, and the club allowed fewer goals than anybody in hockey. Behind that structure a .9122 is the more ordinary half of the tandem — Frederik Andersen posted a .9224 on nearly twice the workload.

His career line across 226 games is a .9187, which is better than either of Carolina’s goaltenders managed last season and was built mostly in Arizona behind considerably worse teams.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 195, which is small by current standards, and the method compensates: he challenges early and plays well outside his crease, which is how a 6-0 goaltender takes away a net.

The cost of that style is the recovery when the play goes across, and the cost of a career of it is a groin and hip record that has never let him take a starter’s schedule.

The Mental Game

Fifteen wins in twenty-eight starts, and the closing stretch of the season once Andersen was hurt.

The honest reading of him is a genuinely good goaltender in a body that has never allowed anybody to find out how good. A .9187 across 226 games spread over nine seasons is a starter’s number and a backup’s sample.

The Intangibles

Undrafted out of Finland, signed by Chicago at twenty-four, and 226 NHL games since, across Chicago, the Rangers, Arizona and Carolina.

He is 33, in the last year of his contract. Both Carolina goaltenders are free agents in July and the only man signed beyond it is Pyotr Kochetkov, who has played three NHL games — which makes the crease the one genuinely unresolved thing about the best defensive club in hockey.

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.

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

    “he challenges early and plays well outside his crease, which is how a 6-0 goaltender takes away a net”

  • undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached

    “Undrafted out of Finland, signed by Chicago at twenty-four, and 226 NHL games since”