This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Cam Talbot
Los Angeles Kings Goaltender
A .9411 as a rookie at twenty-six, an .8984 at thirty-five, and every stop in between.
| 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 | OTT | 36 | 17 | 14 | 2 | 95 | 2.93 | 1 | 935 | .898 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 432 | 218 | 156 | 36 | 1090 | 2.65 | 28 | 12607 | .913 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 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
17-14-2 in 36 games, .8984, 2.93, one shutout on 935 shots — with Ottawa.
An .8984 is his worst full season and the second year running under .9150. The three before it read .9192, .9147 and .9113.
Ten seasons, and the shape of the record is a long plateau in the .910s with a rookie year at .9411 that nothing since has resembled.
He is thirty-six, and Los Angeles is his seventh organisation.
The Finesse Game
6-3 and 202, and a compact, positional style that gets smaller as the reflexes go.
He plays the puck well behind his net — one of the better handling goaltenders in this book — which matters on a club that wants to leave the zone with possession, and Los Angeles took the sixth-best shot-attempt share in the league doing exactly that.
The save percentage has fallen in each of the last two seasons and the workload has not changed. That is the pattern this book keeps finding in goaltenders past thirty-four, and it is the reason the club signed two of them.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, out of Alabama-Huntsville, signed by the Rangers out of college, and 432 NHL games since.
Los Angeles finished twenty-third in goaltending value last season and used four goaltenders doing it. Every one of the four has gone or been replaced, and the club that allowed the second-fewest expected goals per sixty in the league is starting again in the only position where it lost.
He and Rittich are both here on one-year terms. That is the club telling you what it thinks it has bought.
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**, out of Alabama-Huntsville, signed by the Rangers out of college, and 432 NHL games since.”
“He plays the puck well behind his net — one of the better handling goaltenders in this book — which matters on a club that wants to leave the zone with possession, and Los Angeles took the sixth-best shot-attempt share in the league doing exactly that.”