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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35

Darcy Kuemper

Washington Capitals Goaltender

A .9213 that is 5th of fifty-three, and 8,485 career shots at .9177.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2012-13MIN6120102.080119.916
2013-14MIN261284602.432702.914
2014-15MIN3114122682.603718.905
2015-16MIN21675432.432507.915
2016-17MIN18853553.130562.902
2017-18LAK/ARI291275672.524833.920
2018-19ARI55272081262.3351677.925
2019-20ARI2916112652.222903.928
2020-21ARI2710113662.562710.907
2021-22COL57371241382.5451754.921
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—29914395366982.48258485.918

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

57 games for Colorado, 37-12-4, a .9213 save percentage and a 2.54 goals-against, five shutouts on 1,754 shots. That .9213 is 5th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. Hundred-and-sixty-first overall in 2009 by Minnesota — the sixth round — ten seasons, 299 games.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 215 pounds, and 32 years old.

Ten seasons and 8,485 career shots at .9177. The years read .9160 across 119 shots, .9145 across 702, .9053 across 718, .9152 across 507, .9021 across 562, .9196 across 833, .9249 across 1,677, .9280 across 903, .9070 across 710 and .9213 across 1,754.

Seven of the ten are between .9145 and .9280, and the three that are not are the three smallest but one. Fifty-seven games and 1,754 shots is a career high in both, by two games and by seventy-seven shots.

A 32-year-old with eight and a half thousand shots at .9177 is about as well-evidenced as a goaltender gets without being famous.

The Mental Game

Colorado rated exactly level in goaltending — 0.0 goals saved above expectation, 16th in the league — and won the Stanley Cup, beating Tampa Bay in six.

Those two facts belong together and they are the whole reading of this file. A .9213 in front of the 7th-best attempt share in the league and the 3rd-best finishing was worth nothing above expectation, because the model expected it.

Washington is a different building. The club rated plus-1.0 in goaltending, 14th, off 156 conceded at five-on-five against an expectation of 157 — and finished 9th in expected goals against per sixty at even strength and 10th on the penalty kill.

A structure that suppresses chances this well makes a goaltender’s save percentage look better and his goals-saved figure look worse. Both of last season’s clubs did that to him.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures rebound control, lateral recovery, or how he plays the puck behind the net.

What it measures is 8,485 shots at .9177 across ten seasons, with the two largest of them at .9249 and .9213.

Ilya Samsonov’s forty-four games have gone to Toronto and Vitek Vanecek’s forty-two to New Jersey. The crease that split eighty-two games four ways last season now has one man in it who has never played sixty, and Charlie Lindgren behind him with 889 career shots. That is a considerable upgrade on paper and a considerable increase in what one man is being asked to carry.