Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2023-24 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 2023-24 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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79

Carter Hart

Philadelphia Flyers Goaltender

A .9069 behind the worst chance profile in the conference, and twelve goals better than the chances on Sanheim's ice alone.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19PHI3116131812.830976.917
2019-20PHI4324133952.4211100.914
2020-21PHI279115893.671721.877
2021-22PHI45132471373.1611441.905
2022-23PHI552223101552.9421665.907
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—2018484265572.9655903.906

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

22-23-10 in 55 games, .9069, 2.94, two shutouts on 1,665 shots.

30.3 shots a night behind a club that finished twenty-third in the league in five-on-five chances allowed and twenty-fourth in shot-attempt share.

The club-level figure is where the file is fairest. Philadelphia’s goaltending was worth minus-1.6 goals against the chances it faced — fourteenth in the league, which is to say almost exactly average. On a team that finished twenty-sixth, the crease was not the problem: the club allowed 277 goals because it allowed the chances, not because it failed to stop them.

Five seasons, 201 games, a 2.96 career goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-2 and 196, and a technique that has been unusually complete since he was twenty.

He plays a controlled, positional game — square, patient, quiet in the crease, and reliant on being in the right place rather than on getting to it. That is the most durable way to play the position and it is why a .9069 behind this club is a better season than it reads.

The puck-handling is the specific asset. He plays it behind the net and to the wall as well as any goaltender in the league under thirty, and on a blue line whose two most-used men are Sanheim and Ristolainen, that is worth several zone exits a night.

Where he is beaten is on the second chance from the slot. The rebound control is good rather than excellent, and a club that concedes as many attempts as this one turns that into goals.

The Intangibles

Forty-eighth overall in 2016, the second round, and a first NHL game at twenty.

The five seasons read .9170, .9136, .8766, .9049 and .9069, which is a career that has moved with the club in front of it rather than with anything he has done.

He is twenty-five, which is young for a goaltender with 201 games. What the file cannot resolve is the one thing that matters: five seasons behind clubs of this quality do not tell you what a goaltender is, and Philadelphia has not given anybody the chance to find out.

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
  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He plays a controlled, positional game — square, patient, quiet in the crease, and reliant on being in the right place rather than on getting to it.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “He plays it behind the net and to the wall as well as any goaltender in the league under thirty, and on a blue line whose two most-used men are Sanheim and Ristolainen, that is worth several zone exits a night.”

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is good rather than excellent, and a club that concedes as many attempts as this one turns that into goals.”