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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40

Cal Petersen

Los Angeles Kings Goaltender

A .8952 in thirty-seven games — 47th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five — behind the fifth-best possession club in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19LAK11541272.611355.924
2019-20LAK8530212.640269.922
2020-21LAK359185972.8901095.911
2021-22LAK37201421052.8931002.895
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—91393982502.8342721.908

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

37 games, 20-14-2, .8952, 2.89, three shutouts on 1,002 shots.

That save percentage is 47th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games — sixth from the bottom. He won twenty of them anyway, which says more about the club in front of him than about the season.

The Physical Game

Career: 91 games, 39-39-8, .9081 and a 2.83 goals-against across four seasons.

The save percentage has fallen in every one of them: .9239, .9219, .9114, .8952. That is not a bad year inside a good record; it is a straight line, and the workload has grown at the same time.

Three shutouts in thirty-seven games is one more than Jonathan Quick managed in forty-six. That is the one column he won, and shutouts are the noisiest measure a goaltender has.

The Mental Game

The context matters and cuts both ways. Los Angeles took 54.1 per cent of the attempts, fifth in the league, and 52.8 per cent of the chances, eighth. A goaltender behind that club should post a better number than 47th of 53, and the raw record says he did not.

The club-level model rated Los Angeles 7th in goaltending at plus-10.7 goals saved above expectation, which is difficult to square with a .8952 from the man who played forty-five per cent of the minutes. The reconciliation the data allows is that the split was uneven — that Quick carried the surplus — but the repo does not hold per-goaltender expected goals, so that is a reading, not a finding.

The Intangibles

He is 28, and the two seasons in which he has carried real volume produced .9114 and .8952. The club has no obvious third option, so the tandem is what it is, and a 36-year-old taking the larger share of it is not a plan that extends.

Nothing here measures how he moves, what he does with rebounds, or how he handles a bad night. What it measures is that a club with the fifth-best attempt share in hockey got a bottom-sixth save percentage out of its second goaltender, and that is the sort of gap a season turns on.