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 →

33

David Rittich

New York Islanders Goaltender

A .8859 in 34 games with Los Angeles, signed to be the backup who lets Ilya Sorokin play sixty times.

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
2022-23WPG21981502.670506.901
2023-24LAK241363492.153621.921
2024-25LAK3416142882.840771.886
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—23010871265792.7976020.904

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

34 games with Los Angeles, 16-14-2, a .8859 save percentage and a 2.84 goals-against average, on 771 shots faced. No shutouts. He signed with the Islanders in the summer.

A .8859 behind a good defensive club is a poor number. The 16 wins are the reason it was overlooked and they are not a goaltending statistic.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 200 and he plays an aggressive, athletic game rather than a structured one — out at the top of the crease, challenging, and relying on quickness to recover when the play moves.

The consequence is predictable: he is beaten by lateral movement more than a positional goaltender would be, and a second shot in a sequence finds him out of position. The puck-handling is genuinely good and useful to a club that wants to break out quickly. The rebound control is ordinary.

The Mental Game

Eight NHL seasons and five organisations, almost all of it as a backup, and the record is of a goaltender who plays well cold — which is the specific skill the job requires and the one most never acquire.

He does not appear to carry a bad night into the next one, and on a club with a starter playing sixty games, that is the entire brief.

The Intangibles

Undrafted out of the Czech league, signed at 24, and a decade of being the man who plays twenty-five games so that somebody better plays fifty-five.

He is 33 and he is here to protect Sorokin’s workload, and nothing about last season suggests he will do more than that. On a club with no goaltending depth behind him, the floor matters more than the ceiling.

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-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “he plays an aggressive, athletic game rather than a structured one — out at the top of the crease, challenging, and relying on quickness to recover when the play moves.”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “he is beaten by lateral movement more than a positional goaltender would be, and a second shot in a sequence finds him out of position.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is genuinely good and useful to a club that wants to break out quickly.”

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is ordinary.”

  • undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached

    “Undrafted out of the Czech league, signed at 24”