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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35

Ilya Samsonov

Toronto Maple Leafs Goaltender

A .8961 that is 46th of the 53 who played twenty-five games, arriving at a club that rated 29th in goaltending.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20WSH261662602.551689.913
2020-21WSH191341492.692499.902
2021-22WSH44231251193.0231145.896
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—89522282282.8162333.902

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

44 games for Washington, 23-12-5, a .8961 save percentage and a 3.02 goals-against, three shutouts on 1,145 shots. That is 46th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. Twenty-second overall in 2015 by Washington, three seasons, 89 games.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 208 pounds, and 25 years old.

Three seasons and 2,333 career shots at .9023. The years read .9129 across 689 shots, .9018 across 499 and .8961 across 1,145.

Each one lower than the last, and the largest sample is the worst of the three. A hundred and sixty-eight points of decline across three years is not a long trend, and it is the only trend there is.

Forty-four games is a career high by eighteen and the first time he has faced more than a thousand shots.

The Mental Game

Washington rated 14th in the league in goaltending at plus-1.0 goals saved above expectation, so the crease as a whole was close to neutral and his half of it was not: Vitek Vanecek took forty-two games at .9078 across 1,117 shots, so the two halves of that crease were close together and both below the league median.

The skaters in front finished 13th in attempt share and 14th in chances — a good structure, and a .8961 behind it is a poor number rather than an explained one.

Toronto is the opposite arrangement. The club finished 6th in attempt share, 5th in chances and 4th in expected goals against per 60 at even strength — and 29th in goaltending at minus-26.9.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures rebound control, how he tracks a puck through traffic, or what he does on a second chance.

What it measures is 2,333 shots at .9023 from a 25-year-old, with the trend running downward and the largest year the worst.

Toronto conceded 253 goals off the 5th-best chance suppression in the league, which is the clearest single statement of a goaltending problem in this book. Jack Campbell went .9140 — 17th of the 53 — and has gone to Edmonton. The club has replaced a 17th with a 46th and a 20-game .9063, and the record gives no reason to expect the rating improves.