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

Filip Gustavsson

Minnesota Wild Goaltender

Twenty-seven NHL games across two seasons at .9331 and .8920 — a sample too small to read, arriving as the tandem’s other half.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21OTT9512172.160254.933
2021-22OTT185121623.550574.892
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—2710133793.120828.905

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

18 games for Ottawa, 5-12-1, a .8920 save percentage and a 3.55 goals-against, no shutouts on 574 shots. He did not reach the twenty-five-game line the goaltender table uses.

Fifty-fifth overall in 2016, and 27 NHL games at 24.

The Physical Game

The career record is two partial seasons and they disagree completely. Nine games in 2020-21 at .9331; eighteen in 2021-22 at .8920. Career .9046 across 828 shots.

Eight hundred shots is not a sample that separates a goaltender from noise, and anyone quoting either of those numbers as a talent estimate is quoting variance. That is the honest position and it is the only one this record supports.

The Mental Game

The context of the bad year matters and does not excuse it. Ottawa was a poor club and he went 5-12-1 behind it.

He arrives in a crease where Minnesota rated 23rd in the league in goaltending at minus-13, and where the two men who played eighty-five per cent of last season’s minutes have both gone. The club has replaced its measured weakness with a 24-year-old carrying 27 games of NHL evidence.

The Intangibles

Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender’s technique, and with a sample this size nothing measures his results either.

What can be said is the shape of the bet: a 113-point club that scored more than any team should expect to, and whose only rated weakness was its goaltending, has handed half of that crease to a man with a career .9046 and a 37-year-old holding the other half.

If Minnesota’s finishing regresses toward the league and the goaltending does not improve, the 113 points do not survive — and this is the position the whole thing turns on.