Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2023-24 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 2023-24 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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90

Elvis Merzlikins

Columbus Blue Jackets Goaltender

A save percentage that has fallen in each of his four seasons, from .9227 to .8763.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20CBJ331398712.355919.923
2020-21CBJ288125692.772825.916
2021-22CBJ59272371783.2221920.907
2022-23CBJ3071821104.230889.876
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1505562224283.1394553.906

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

30 games, 7-18-2, .8763 — the second-worst save percentage in the league among goaltenders who played 25 games — with a 4.23 goals-against average and no shutouts on 889 shots.

The four-season sequence is the report: .9227, .9164, .9073, .8763. It has fallen every year since he arrived, and last season it fell off a cliff.

Columbus’s goaltending graded minus-34.1 and finished 31st. He is the largest part of that and he is not all of it: Daniil Tarasov managed .8920 over 17 games behind the same defence, which was the club’s best figure and would still have been the worst starting number on twenty other teams.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 190. The technique is athletic rather than positional — he covers ground quickly, reads the play late and makes a proportion of his saves out of position, which produces both the highlights and the goals.

The rebound is the recurring problem and it has been since 2021. He does not kill the puck, and on a club conceding 330 goals the second chance is the one that gets punished.

He is genuinely good with the puck behind his net and Columbus use him as a third defenceman on the breakout, which is one thing the record has not taken away.

The Intangibles

76th overall in 2014, five seasons in the Swiss league before he ever played an NHL game, and a rookie year in 2019-20 that produced five shutouts in 33 games.

He signed a five-year contract in January 2022 on the strength of that. Since signing it he has posted .9073 and .8763.

He is 29. There is a good goaltender in the record and it is three years behind him.

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
  • 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

    “He does not kill the puck, and on a club conceding 330 goals the second chance is the one that gets punished.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “He is genuinely good with the puck behind his net and Columbus use him as a third defenceman on the breakout, which is one thing the record has not taken away.”

  • lateral-recoverya strength· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “he covers ground quickly, reads the play late and makes a proportion of his saves out of position”