Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
← 2025-26 edition

This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

37

Connor Hellebuyck

Winnipeg Jets Goaltender

Forty-seven wins, a .9249, eight shutouts, and thirty-two goals of goaltending — the best figure in the league.

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
2022-23WPG64372521572.4941964.920
2023-24WPG60371941422.3951798.921
2024-25WPG63471231252.0081664.925
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—5683221854414062.564517066.918

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

47-12-3 in 63 games with a .9249, a 2.00 average and 8 shutouts, facing 1,664 shots. He won the Vezina and the Hart Trophy, and the club won the Presidents’ Trophy.

The club’s goaltending came in 32.0 goals better than the chances faced, 1st in the league by a distance. At five-on-five it conceded 114 goals against an expectation of 146. That is the season, and there is no second explanation for it.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 207 and he plays deeper than almost anybody at this level. He sets in the crease, he does not chase the shot out, and he lets the frame do the work — the puck finds him rather than the other way round.

The rebound control is the best in the league and it is the whole method. He absorbs what he can and directs the rest to the corner, and a club that concedes 32 fewer goals than its chances is a club that is not defending second shots. He tracks pucks through traffic as well as anybody in the sport. The puck-handling is adequate and no more.

The Mental Game

Ten seasons, 568 games and a .9176, on a club that has been good, average and bad in that time and has never once been carried by anything but him.

He had been given the Vezina twice before and had never been past the second round. He is the first goaltender to win the Hart Trophy in a decade. He is also the goaltender who has repeatedly been the best player in the league in October and something less in May, and that file is now the entire conversation about him.

The Intangibles

A fifth-round pick in 2012 — 130th overall — out of a Michigan high-school programme and UMass Lowell, and 322 career wins.

He is 32 and has played more than 60 games in seven separate seasons. Nobody in this edition is more important to his club than he is to this one, and it is not a close question.

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
  • he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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

    “**6-4 and 207 and he plays deeper than almost anybody at this level.** He sets in the crease, he does not chase the shot out, and he lets the frame do the work — the puck finds him rather than the other way round.”

  • rebound-controla strength· where the second chance ends up

    “**The rebound control is the best in the league and it is the whole method.** He absorbs what he can and directs the rest to the corner, and a club that concedes 32 fewer goals than its chances is a club that is not defending second shots.”

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “**He tracks pucks through traffic as well as anybody in the sport.**”

  • puck-handlingpresent and ordinary· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is adequate and no more.”

  • plays-aggressivehe lacks it· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He sets in the crease, he does not chase the shot out, and he lets the frame do the work — the puck finds him rather than the other way round.”