Brian Elliott

Fifteen seasons and 13,562 shots, and five straight declining years before nineteen games at .9121.

Season	Team	GP	W	L	OTL	GA	GAA	SO	SA	SV%

2007-08	OTT	1	1	0	0	1	1.01	0	29	.966
2008-09	OTT	31	16	8	3	77	2.77	1	786	.902
2009-10	OTT	55	29	18	4	130	2.57	5	1424	.909
2010-11	OTT/COL	55	15	27	9	166	3.34	3	1551	.893
2011-12	STL	38	23	10	4	58	1.56	9	972	.940
2012-13	STL	24	14	8	1	49	2.28	3	526	.907
2013-14	STL	31	18	6	2	53	1.96	4	681	.922
2014-15	STL	46	26	14	3	96	2.26	5	1150	.916
2015-16	STL	42	23	8	6	78	2.07	4	1113	.930
2016-17	CGY	49	26	18	3	121	2.55	2	1338	.910
2017-18	PHI	43	23	11	7	112	2.66	1	1228	.909
2018-19	PHI	26	11	11	1	69	2.96	1	741	.907
2019-20	PHI	31	16	7	4	80	2.87	2	796	.899
2020-21	PHI	30	15	9	2	82	3.06	2	738	.889
2021-22	TBL	19	11	4	3	43	2.43	1	489	.912
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	521	267	159	52	1215	2.53	43	13562	.910

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

19 games, 11-4-3, a .9121 save percentage and a 2.43 goals-against, one shutout on 489 shots. Two hundred and ninety-first overall in 2003 by Ottawa — the ninth round — fifteen seasons, 521 games.

Nineteen games is well short of the twenty-five this book requires before it will place a goaltender in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 221 pounds, and 37 years old.

Fifteen seasons and 13,562 career shots at .9104 — a larger body of evidence than Andrei Vasilevskiy has accumulated in front of him, and 2,500 shots more than James Reimer’s in San Jose.

The career high is .9403 across 972 shots in 2011-12 and the run since 2016-17 reads .9096, .9088, .9069, .8995, .8889 — five consecutive seasons, each one lower than the last, and then .9121 across 489 shots last year.

Four hundred and eighty-nine shots is a quarter of what Andrei Vasilevskiy faced, and it reversed a five-year slide. The record cannot say whether that is the club in front of him or the man.

The Mental Game

Tampa Bay rated 6th in the league in goaltending at plus-11.7, from a crease that Vasilevskiy occupied for sixty-three of eighty-two games.

The skaters finished 12th in attempt share, 10th in chances and 12th in expected goals against per 60 at even strength, which is a substantially better structure than the Philadelphia clubs where the five-year decline happened. Philadelphia finished 27th in attempt share last season and 29th in the standings.

Eleven wins in nineteen appearances.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures technique, rebound control or how he handles a screen at 37.

What it measures is 13,562 shots at .9104 across fifteen seasons, a five-year decline into the .880s, and one good nineteen-game year behind a contender.

Andrei Vasilevskiy has played sixty or more games in two of the last five seasons and fifty or more in four. What a club needs from the second goaltender behind that is nineteen games at .9121, which is exactly what it got, and the fifteen-year record says not to expect it twice.