This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Cam Talbot
Ottawa Senators Goaltender
Eleven thousand six hundred career shots at .9148, arriving at 35 from the club with the best finishing rate in the league.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | NYR | 21 | 12 | 6 | 1 | 33 | 1.64 | 3 | 560 | .941 |
| 2014-15 | NYR | 36 | 21 | 9 | 4 | 77 | 2.21 | 5 | 1038 | .926 |
| 2015-16 | EDM | 56 | 21 | 27 | 5 | 137 | 2.55 | 3 | 1648 | .917 |
| 2016-17 | EDM | 73 | 42 | 22 | 8 | 171 | 2.39 | 7 | 2117 | .919 |
| 2017-18 | EDM | 67 | 31 | 31 | 3 | 188 | 3.02 | 1 | 2036 | .908 |
| 2018-19 | EDM/PHI | 35 | 11 | 17 | 3 | 108 | 3.40 | 1 | 997 | .892 |
| 2019-20 | CGY | 26 | 12 | 10 | 1 | 63 | 2.63 | 2 | 780 | .919 |
| 2020-21 | MIN | 33 | 19 | 8 | 5 | 86 | 2.63 | 2 | 1008 | .915 |
| 2021-22 | MIN | 49 | 32 | 12 | 4 | 132 | 2.76 | 3 | 1488 | .911 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 396 | 201 | 142 | 34 | 995 | 2.63 | 27 | 11672 | .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
49 games for Minnesota, 32-12-4, a .9113 save percentage and a 2.76 goals-against, three shutouts on 1,488 shots. That is 22nd of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games — a shade above the middle.
Undrafted, and 396 NHL games with five clubs, 201 wins and twenty-seven shutouts out of it.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 202 pounds, the same build as the man he is joining.
Nine seasons and 11,672 shots at .9148. The record has one peak and one trough that both need discounting: .9411 across 560 shots as a 26-year-old backup in New York, and .8917 across 997 in the season he was traded out of Edmonton.
Take those two out and he has finished between .9077 and .9258 in every other year. That is a long, flat, slightly-above-average record.
The Mental Game
The thirty-two wins want a qualifier. Minnesota finished 1st in the league in finishing at plus-49.1 goals above expectation — the largest figure in hockey — and 23rd in goaltending at minus-13.0.
He won thirty-two games on the club that scored more above its expectation than any other, while his own crease rated 23rd. Neither of those is a criticism on its own and together they say the record is the roster.
He arrives at a club that finished 28th in finishing at minus-8.9, which is the opposite correction.
The Intangibles
He is 35 with 396 games. Anton Forsberg is 29 with 102 games and one good season, so this is a genuine competition rather than a backup signing.
Nothing here measures the technique or what a tenth season does to a goaltender’s legs. What it measures is a career figure of .9148 across eleven and a half thousand shots, which is a shade better than league average and a great deal more reliable than anything else in this crease.
A club 26th in the league with two goaltenders who are both roughly league-average is not fixing its problem, and the problem is not in the crease: Ottawa rated 15th in goaltending and 28th on the penalty kill.
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.
“Undrafted, and 396 NHL games with five clubs, 201 wins and twenty-seven shutouts out of it.”