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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60

Collin Delia

Vancouver Canucks Goaltender

Thirty-two NHL games and 1,031 shots across five calendar years, undrafted.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2017-18CHI211073.96063.889
2018-19CHI16643503.610545.908
2020-21CHI6131203.590205.902
2021-22CHI8141223.850218.899
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—329125993.6801031.904

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

8 games for Chicago, 1-4-1, a .8991 save percentage and a 3.85 goals-against, no shutouts on 218 shots. Undrafted, and thirty-two NHL games across four seasons out of it.

Eight games is a third 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 208 pounds, and 28 years old.

Four seasons and 1,031 career shots at .9040. The years read .8889 across sixty-three shots, .9083 across 545, .9024 across 205 and .8991 across 218.

Three of the four are below .9030 and the largest is the only one above it. A thousand shots across five calendar years is not enough to separate a career from a coin toss, and the record does not try.

Sixteen games in 2018-19 is the most he has played in a season.

The Mental Game

Chicago rated 27th in the league in goaltending at minus-24.9 goals saved above expectation, and the crease also carried Marc-Andre Fleury and Kevin Lankinen.

The skaters in front finished 29th in attempt share and 29th in chances, and conceded 291 goals — that is a genuine alibi and it is the same one every Chicago goaltender had.

One win in eight appearances.

He arrives at a club whose crease rated 1st in the league, behind a 26-year-old who played sixty-four games.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures technique, and 218 shots would not settle it if it did.

What it measures is 1,031 shots at .9040 from a 28-year-old who has never held an NHL job for a full season.

Thatcher Demko faced 1,967 shots last year and Jaroslav Halak, who took seventeen of the remaining eighteen games, has gone to the Rangers. What Vancouver needs from the second goaltender is fifteen games at something near .900, and the record says that is roughly what he is — with a sample too small to promise it.