Armchair Hockey Scout Beta

This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

90

Elvis Merzlikins

Columbus Blue Jackets Goaltender

An .8973, and three straight seasons below .9000.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20CBJ331398712.355919.923
2020-21CBJ288125692.772825.916
2021-22CBJ59272371783.2221920.907
2022-23CBJ3071821104.230889.876
2023-24CBJ41131781303.4511266.897
2024-25 so far
Career1916879305583.20105819.904

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

13-17-8 with an .8973, a 3.45 average and 1 shutout in 41 games, facing 1,266 shots.

The club’s goaltending came in 0.4 goals worse than the chances faced, 16th in the league, in front of the second-worst chance suppression in hockey. He is most of that and it is exactly neutral.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 190 and light for the position. He plays aggressively, meeting the shooter well out of the crease, which is a style that needs the defence in front to funnel play to the outside — and this defence was 31st in the league at doing it.

The rebound control is the weakness. A career .9041 across 191 games with three straight seasons below .9000 says the second chance goes back into the slot rather than to the corner.

The lateral recovery is quick and the athleticism is genuine — he makes a save two or three times a month that a positional goaltender does not reach.

The Mental Game

Five seasons and 191 games, all of them here, on clubs that have made the playoffs once. He has carried a great deal that had nothing to do with hockey and the record cannot separate it.

An .8973 over forty-one games is not a slump; it is the third year of the same number.

The Intangibles

Seventy-sixth overall in 2014, out of Riga, and 191 games and a career .9041 at 30.

A club conceding 300 goals with exactly neutral goaltending has nothing to fix in the crease and nothing to lean on there either, and that is the least comfortable sentence in this chapter.