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 →

33

David Rittich

Winnipeg Jets Goaltender

An .8863 on 431 shots, and a career .9049 that has fallen in each of the last three seasons.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2016-17CGY100013.00010.900
2017-18CGY21863492.920512.904
2018-19CGY4527951092.6111228.911
2019-20CGY48241761382.9721478.907
2020-21CGY/TOR19582462.861463.901
2021-22NSH17634493.570431.886
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—1517043203922.9044122.905

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

17 games for Nashville, 6-3-4, an .8863 save percentage and a 3.57 goals-against, no shutouts on 431 shots. Undrafted, and 151 NHL games across six seasons out of it.

Seventeen games is well short of the twenty-five this book requires before it will place a goaltender in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 200 pounds, and 30 years old.

Six seasons and 4,122 career shots at .9049. The years read .9000 across ten shots, .9043 across 512, .9112 across 1,228, .9066 across 1,478, .9006 across 463 and .8863 across 431.

The two seasons that carry the weight are 1,228 shots at .9112 and 1,478 at .9066, both in Calgary, both four and five years ago. Everything since is under .9010 on small samples.

Forty-five and forty-eight games in 2018-19 and 2019-20; nineteen, seventeen and nothing like a starter’s load since.

The Mental Game

Nashville rated 18th in the league in goaltending at minus-4.1 goals saved above expectation, and the crease was Juuse Saros’s — sixty-seven games and 2,107 shots, the largest game total of the fifty-three.

Seventeen appearances behind a club that finished 17th in attempt share and 17th in chances, and 22nd on the penalty kill. There is no alibi in the structure and there is not much sample in the number either.

Six wins in seventeen at an .8863.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures technique, and 431 shots would not settle it if it did.

What it measures is a 30-year-old with 4,122 career shots at .9049, whose best two seasons ended four years ago and whose last three read .9006, .8863 and a total of thirty-six appearances.

He arrives behind Connor Hellebuyck, who faced 2,155 shots last season and eighteen hundred or more in four of the last five. The backup’s job in Winnipeg is sixteen starts, and the record says the range on those runs from .8863 to .9112 with the recent evidence at the wrong end of it.