Armchair Hockey Scout

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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.
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80

Daniil Tarasov

Florida Panthers Goaltender

An .8805 in 20 games, and a 6-5 backup acquired for a fourth-round pick.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2021-22CBJ402072.400111.937
2022-23CBJ174111573.910528.892
2023-24CBJ248113733.180796.908
2024-25CBJ207102653.541544.880
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—65193462023.4411979.898

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

7-10-2 in 20 games, .8805 with a 3.54 average and 1 shutout on 544 shots with Columbus.

An .8805 is a poor number in any context. Columbus finished 26th at suppressing chances, which explains some of it and not the gap to his partner.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 203, and the game is large and raw. He covers an enormous amount of the net simply by standing in it, and the athleticism is genuine.

The technique is the problem. The depth in the crease varies, he is square less often than he should be, and the rebound control is poor — pucks come off him into the slot. For a goaltender this size those are correctable faults and they have not been corrected in four seasons.

The Mental Game

Four NHL seasons of intermittent work behind a poor club, and no save percentage above .900 among them.

There is no record of him unravelling and none of a sustained good stretch either. The read is a goaltender who has never had a settled situation.

The Intangibles

A third-round pick, five years in the Columbus organisation, and a trade at 26 for a fourth-round pick.

Florida has a long record of improving goaltenders that other clubs gave up on, and it needs 30 starts from somebody behind a 36-year-old. That is the bet, and the price makes it a sensible one.

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.

  • 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.

  • rebound-controlhe lacks it· where the second chance ends up

    “the rebound control is poor — pucks come off him into the slot”

  • plays-deephe lacks it· takes the net away by occupying it

    “The depth in the crease varies, he is square less often than he should be”