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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34

Dustin Tokarski

Pittsburgh Penguins Goaltender

A .8989 across 900 shots — 42nd of 53 — from a goaltender whose career is 2,184 shots spread over thirteen years.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2009-10TBL200034.06016.813
2011-12TBL5131143.450116.879
2013-14MTL320051.84193.946
2014-15MTL17664462.750509.910
2015-16MTL6130123.18098.878
2016-17ANA100000.00051.000
2020-21BUF13282433.540447.904
2021-22BUF2910125913.271900.899
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—762232122143.1422184.902

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

29 games for Buffalo, 10-12-5, a .8989 save percentage and a 3.27 goals-against, one shutout on 900 shots. That is 42nd of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. One hundred and twenty-second overall in 2008 by Tampa Bay — the fifth round — eight seasons, 76 games.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 198 pounds, and 33 years old with seventy-six NHL games spread across thirteen calendar years.

The career is 2,184 shots and .9020. Twenty-nine games last season is more than a third of it, and before that the largest sample he had ever produced was seventeen games in 2014-15.

The record has almost nothing in it that can be read. Four of his eight seasons contain fewer than a hundred shots — a 1.000 across five, a .9462 across ninety-three, an .8125 across sixteen. Those are not save percentages, they are rounding.

The two real samples are .9038 across 447 shots and .8989 across 900, both in Buffalo, both below league average.

The Mental Game

Buffalo rated 28th in the league in goaltending at minus-26.5, from a crease that also carried Craig Anderson at .8974 — 45th of the fifty-three — and the skaters in front finished 20th in attempt share and 26th in chances.

He is joining a club that finished 7th in chance share and 9th in goaltending, which is close to the largest possible change in working conditions.

Tristan Jarry played fifty-eight games and Casey DeSmith twenty-six, so what Pittsburgh has bought is a third goaltender rather than a second.

The Intangibles

Nothing in the file speaks to technique, and seventy-six games across thirteen years would not settle it if it did.

What can be said is that he has been an NHL goaltender since 2009 and has never once been given a full season. Two thousand one hundred and eighty-four career shots across thirteen years is barely more than Tristan Jarry faced last season alone.

A .8989 behind the 26th-ranked chance suppression in hockey is not the same object as a .8989 behind the 7th. That is the only interesting thing about the signing and the record will not settle it either, because he is unlikely to play enough games for anyone to find out.