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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1

Casey DeSmith

Vancouver Canucks Goaltender

Undrafted, a career .9121, and five seasons of being the other goaltender.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2017-18PIT14641282.401356.921
2018-19PIT3615115892.7531060.916
2020-21PIT201170482.542543.912
2021-22PIT261165662.793769.914
2022-23PIT38151641093.1701142.905
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1345844153402.8193870.912

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

15-16-4 in 38 games, .9046, 3.17, no shutouts on 1,142 shots for Pittsburgh.

That is nineteenth of the 35 goaltenders in this book who faced a thousand shots — just below the middle — and those 35 stopped .9067 between them. On 1,142 shots the distance from that rate to his is about two goals.

Thirty-eight games is the most he has played in a season, at thirty-one, in his fifth NHL year.

Five seasons, 134 games, a career .9121, which is a better figure than the .9046 and is built on 3,870 shots.

No shutouts in thirty-eight games is the odd line, and it is the third season of five in which he has managed fewer than three.

The Finesse Game

6-0 and 188 pounds, which is small for a modern goaltender, and it shows in the method: he cannot cover the net by filling it, so he plays aggressively and cuts the angle down early.

He plays high in his crease and the trade is the one every goaltender that size makes — the first shot is taken away and the cross-ice pass leaves him travelling.

The rebound control is adequate rather than good.

The puck-handling is a real strength and has been since Pittsburgh started using him: he leaves it where a defenceman can take it without turning.

The seasons read .9213 on 356 shots, .9160 on 1,060, .9116 on 543, .9142 on 769 and .9046 on 1,142. Four of those five are above the .9067 the league’s regulars managed last season, and the fifth is the largest sample. A career .9121 across 134 games is a genuinely respectable backup record.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, five seasons, 134 games, all of them in Pittsburgh.

58 wins, nine shutouts, and a career .9121 on 3,870 shots.

He is thirty-two, traded to a club that finished twenty-ninth in goaltending, to back up a starter who has played more than forty games once in six seasons.

That last sentence is why this is not a backup signing. An undrafted goaltender with a career .9121 arriving behind Thatcher Demko’s injury record is a club buying thirty starts, not ten, and on the record above those thirty starts should be better than what Vancouver got last season.

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.

  • plays-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He plays high in his crease and the trade is the one every goaltender that size makes — the first shot is taken away and the cross-ice pass leaves him travelling.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is a real strength and has been since Pittsburgh started using him: he leaves it where a defenceman can take it without turning.”

  • undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached

    “An undrafted goaltender with a career .9121 arriving behind Thatcher Demko's injury record is a club buying thirty starts, not ten, and on the record above those thirty starts should be better than what Vancouver got last season.”