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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32

Felix Sandstrom

Philadelphia Flyers Goaltender

Five NHL games and 177 shots, on a club that has just lost the man who played thirty-five of them.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2021-22PHI5041163.230177.910
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—5041163.230177.910

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

5 games, 0-4-1, a .9096 save percentage and a 3.23 goals-against, no shutouts on 177 shots. Seventieth overall in 2015 — the third round — and those five games are his entire NHL career.

One hundred and seventy-seven shots is not a sample. It is one week of a starter’s work, and everything below is written with that in front of it.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 211 pounds, which is the standard build for the position and tells you nothing.

A .9096 sits between Jonathan Quick’s .9097 and Marc-Andre Fleury’s .9082 among the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. He played five. The figure is quoted here because it is the only one there is, not because it means anything at this size — a single soft goal moves it by fifty points.

No wins in five appearances, on a club that finished 29th in the standings and gave up 298 goals.

The Mental Game

Philadelphia rated 19th in the league in goaltending at minus-7.2, from three goaltenders. Carter Hart took forty-five games at .9049 and Martin Jones thirty-five at .9001, and Jones has gone to Seattle.

That leaves a 24-year-old starter with 146 games and a 25-year-old with five. There is no third option on this roster, and the club has not brought one in.

The skaters in front of whoever plays were 27th in the league in attempt share and 29th in expected goals against per 60 at even strength. Whatever is measured next season will be measured through that.

The Intangibles

Nothing in the file speaks to technique, rebound control or how he reads a play, and five games would not settle any of it if the fields existed.

What can be said: he is 25, a third-round pick, and has spent seven years becoming an NHL backup. The organisation drafted him the year before it drafted Carter Hart and has kept both.

A .9096 in five games is neither evidence nor its absence. The one thing the record does establish is that Philadelphia now needs him to be an NHL goaltender for thirty games, and it has never asked him for more than five.