Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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.
← 2022-23 edition

This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

37

Connor Hellebuyck

Winnipeg Jets Goaltender

The most shots faced of any goaltender in the league, at a .9104 that is 25th of fifty-three.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2015-16WPG2613111562.342683.918
2016-17WPG56261941462.8941572.907
2017-18WPG67441191562.3662048.924
2018-19WPG63342331792.9022051.913
2019-20WPG58312151402.5761796.922
2020-21WPG45241731122.5841335.916
2021-22WPG662927101932.9742155.910
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—381201129359822.692811640.916

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

66 games, 29-27-10, a .9104 save percentage and a 2.97 goals-against, four shutouts on 2,155 shots — the most faced by any of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. That .9104 is 25th of the same 53. Hundred-and-thirtieth overall in 2012 by Winnipeg — the fifth round — seven seasons, 381 games.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 207 pounds, and 29 years old.

Seven seasons and 11,640 career shots at .9156. The years read .9180 across 683 shots, .9071 across 1,572, .9238 across 2,048, .9127 across 2,051, .9220 across 1,796, .9161 across 1,335 and .9104 across 2,155.

Six of the seven are between .9104 and .9238. That is the narrowest band anybody in this batch of three clubs carries, across four times the sample any of them has.

Sixty-six games is the second-largest workload of the fifty-three and 2,155 shots the largest outright. He has faced eighteen hundred or more in four of the last five seasons.

The .9104 is the second-lowest figure of his career and it came on the largest volume of his career.

The Mental Game

Winnipeg rated 8th in the league in goaltending at plus-10.5 goals saved above expectation.

The five-on-five ledger says where that came from. The club conceded 162 goals against an expectation of 172.5 — ten and a half fewer than the model asked — while scoring 156 against an expectation of 173.2.

Seventeen short in front and ten and a half ahead behind it. He was the best thing about this season by a distance and the club finished 19th anyway.

The skaters in front were 18th in attempt share and 16th in chances — the middle of the league in both — and 27th on the penalty kill at 7.308 expected goals against per 60.

A .9104 is an ordinary number and plus-10.5 is not, and the gap between them is the volume: 2,155 shots is a great many chances to be worth ten goals over.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures rebound control, how he tracks a puck through a screen, or what he does on a second chance.

What it measures is 11,640 career shots at .9156 across seven seasons, four of them above sixty games.

He is 29 and there is more evidence in this file than in any other goaltender’s in the batch. A 29-27-10 record and a 2.97 goals-against read like a middling season and the goals-saved model says it was the eighth-best crease in hockey. Both are true, and the record between them is a club that could not score.