Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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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31

Igor Shesterkin

New York Rangers Goaltender

The best save percentage in the league by a distance, on a club that finished 25th in chance share.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20NYR121020292.520424.932
2020-21NYR3516143832.622987.916
2021-22NYR53361341062.0761622.935
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—100622972182.3183033.928

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

53 games, 36-13-4, a .9346 save percentage and a 2.07 goals-against, six shutouts on 1,622 shots. That is the best save percentage of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games, and it is not close: Ilya Sorokin is 2nd at .9251.

Ninety-five points of save percentage between first and second is a larger gap than the one between second and twelfth.

A third-round pick in 2014, three NHL seasons, 100 games.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 199 pounds, which is small for a modern starter and not remarkably so.

Three seasons: .9316 across 424 shots, .9159 across 987, .9346 across 1,622. Career .9281 on 3,033 shots.

The middle figure matters. A hundred and eighty-seven points separate his second season from his third, and 987 shots is not a small sample. This is not a flat record like Juuse Saros’s; it is a record with one enormous year at the end of it.

The Mental Game

The club in front of him was not good at five-on-five. New York finished 24th in attempt share, 25th in chance share and 28th in expected goals per 60 at even strength — a bottom-quarter possession club that won 52 games.

It finished 2nd in the league in goaltending at plus-23.4 goals saved above expectation. At five-on-five it conceded 148 goals against an expectation of 171.4.

Twenty-three goals, and the record went 52-24-6. Look through the individual ledgers on this roster and the same figure appears everywhere: Jacob Trouba’s ice gave back twelve fewer than the model asked, K’Andre Miller’s thirteen fewer, Artemi Panarin’s fourteen fewer, Barclay Goodrow’s thirteen fewer.

The Intangibles

He is 26 and has one hundred NHL games.

Nothing here measures how he tracks a puck, moves post to post, or handles a rebound. What it measures is the largest single-season save percentage in the league, on 1,622 shots, behind a club that gave up chances at the 25th-best rate in hockey.

A 110-point season built on one number is a fragile thing, and this report says so plainly: the skaters were 24th and 25th in the two possession measures and the goaltender was 1st in the only one that counted.