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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31

Igor Shesterkin

New York Rangers Goaltender

Thirty-seven wins and a save percentage tenth of forty-two, a season after the best one in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20NYR121020292.520424.932
2020-21NYR3516143832.622987.916
2021-22NYR53361341062.0761622.935
2022-23NYR58371381442.4831719.916
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1589942153622.37114752.924

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

37-13-8 in 58 games, .9162, 2.48, three shutouts on 1,719 shots.

Thirty-seven wins is tied for third in the league. The .9162 is tenth of the forty-two goaltenders who played thirty games, against a median of .9029, and it is a substantial step down from the .9346 that won him the Vezina the season before.

New York’s goaltending was worth plus-17.3 goals against the chances it faced, fifth in the league, on a club that finished twenty-first in even-strength expected goals for and sixteenth against. Ninety-three of the club’s 107 points were assembled on the power play and in this crease.

29.6 shots a night across fifty-eight appearances. Four seasons, 158 games, a 2.37 career goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-1 and 199, which is small by the standards of the modern position and is the reason the technique looks the way it does.

He plays aggressively — well out of his crease, challenging the shooter, taking away the top of the net that a 6-1 goaltender cannot cover by standing still. It is the highest-variance way to play the position and it is the only one available at his size.

The glove is the specific asset. He catches pucks that other goaltenders deflect, and the difference between a save and a rebound in the slot is most of what separates a .9346 season from a .9162 one.

Where he is beaten is low and across. The aggression costs him on the second play in a sequence, and a club with this blue line’s foot speed does not always get the puck out before there is one.

The Intangibles

One hundred and eighteenth overall in 2014, the fourth round, four more seasons in Russia, and a first North American game at twenty-four.

The career line is 158 games at a 2.37 goals-against average across four seasons, one of which was the best in the league.

What the file has to hold in view is that a .9346 does not repeat and a .9162 is not a decline — both are within the ordinary year-to-year movement of the position. What is not ordinary is a club constructing 107 points on the second-best power play in the league and the fifth-best goaltending while finishing twenty-first in even-strength chance creation. That is a structure with two legs.

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.

  • plays-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He plays aggressively — well out of his crease, challenging the shooter, taking away the top of the net that a 6-1 goaltender cannot cover by standing still.”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The aggression costs him on the second play in a sequence, and a club with this blue line's foot speed does not always get the puck out before there is one.”