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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79

Charlie Lindgren

Washington Capitals Goaltender

Five games and 118 shots at .9576, against 889 career shots at .9134.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2015-16MTL110022.00028.929
2016-17MTL220031.48059.949
2017-18MTL14482423.032457.908
2018-19MTL110054.62049.898
2019-20MTL6240203.330178.888
2021-22STL550051.220118.958
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—2915122772.742889.913

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

5 games for St Louis, 5-0-0, a .9576 save percentage and a 1.22 goals-against, no shutouts on 118 shots. Undrafted, and twenty-nine NHL games across six seasons out of it.

Five games is a fifth of the twenty-five this book requires before it will place a goaltender in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 190 pounds, and 28 years old.

Six seasons and 889 career shots at .9134. The years read .9286 across twenty-eight shots, .9492 across fifty-nine, .9081 across 457, .8980 across forty-nine, .8876 across 178 and .9576 across 118.

Only one of those six is a sample: 457 shots in 2017-18, at .9081. Every other season in the file is under two hundred shots, and the two highest figures in it come from twenty-eight and 118.

Five wins in five appearances is the sort of line that gets a contract and settles nothing.

The Mental Game

St Louis rated 10th in the league in goaltending at plus-4.6 goals saved above expectation, tied with Vegas, and the crease was Jordan Binnington’s and Ville Husso’s.

The skaters in front finished 2nd in the league in finishing at plus-34.8 and 26th in attempt share — an unusual combination and not one that tells you much about 118 shots.

Six seasons, twenty-nine games, and a first NHL win in 2015-16.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures technique, and 118 shots would not settle it if it did.

What it measures is a 28-year-old with 889 career NHL shots, of whom 457 came in one season five years ago at .9081.

He arrives as the backup to Darcy Kuemper, who has 8,485 career shots at .9177 and has never played sixty games in a season. Washington took forty-four games from Ilya Samsonov and forty-two from Vitek Vanecek last year and both have gone.

What the club needs from this position is twenty-five starts at something near .905. The record contains no evidence at all that he can produce them and none that he cannot, and five games at .9576 is the least informative number in this chapter.