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.
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80

Dan Vladar

Calgary Flames Goaltender

Thirteen wins and a .9063 in 23 games, in a first real NHL season at twenty-four.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21BOS5221173.400149.886
2021-22CGY231362572.752608.906
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—281583742.882757.902

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

23 games, 13-6-2, a .9063 save percentage and a 2.75 goals-against average, with 2 shutouts on 608 shots faced.

Thirteen wins in 23 games, in his first season as an NHL backup, on the club whose goaltending finished 5th in the league.

Twenty-three games and 608 shots is not enough to separate a goaltender from his team, and the team allowed the 5th-lowest rate of expected goals against at even strength in the league.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 209, and the method is the modern large-goaltender one: deep, square, patient, letting the puck come to him and covering the low corners with the pads rather than reaching for them.

Twenty-eight career games and a .9022. Five of them came in Boston at .8859 and the other 23 here.

The Mental Game

Four years in the Boston organisation and five NHL games in them, then the backup job here at 24, and 13 wins in 23. Nothing about that record is unusual for a good backup on a very good team, and nothing about it is unusual for an ordinary one either.

The honest position is that this is a goaltender with a quarter of a season’s evidence behind a top-five defence.

The Intangibles

Seventy-fifth overall in 2015 by Boston, third round, and 28 NHL games at 25.

Behind a 32-year-old starter who played 63 games, the backup’s job here is 20 starts and no disasters. He did that, and the interesting question is what happens the year Markstrom is 34.

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.

  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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-deeppresent and ordinary· takes the net away by occupying it

    “6-5 and 209, and the method is the modern large-goaltender one”