Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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35

Ilya Samsonov

Toronto Maple Leafs Goaltender

A .9189 in the season after Washington let him go, and a career .9079 underneath it.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20WSH261662602.551689.913
2020-21WSH191341492.692499.902
2021-22WSH44231251193.0231145.896
2022-23TOR4227105962.3341184.919
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1317932133242.65103517.908

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

27-10-5 in 42 games, .9189, 2.33, four shutouts on 1,184 shots.

That is the sixth-best save percentage of the 35 goaltenders in this book who faced a thousand shots, level with Jake Oettinger and behind Linus Ullmark, Filip Gustavsson, Ilya Sorokin, Connor Hellebuyck and nobody else.

The pool of those 35 stopped .9067 between them. On 1,184 shots, the distance from that rate to his is about fourteen goals.

Toronto’s goaltending was worth plus-13.4 goals against the chances it faced, sixth in the league, which is the corroboration: this was not a case of a club handing its goaltender easy work. He faced 28.2 shots a night behind a team that finished fourth in chance share, and stopped more of them than the chances said he would.

Four seasons, 131 games, a career .9079.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 208 pounds, which is ordinary size for the position now, and he plays a fairly deep, square game that relies on being in the right place rather than on reaching.

He is positionally sound and does not chase the puck, and the low-percentage shots that beat a scrambling goaltender do not often beat him.

The glove has always been the strength and the four shutouts say something about the nights when it is working.

The rebound control is the weakness. The puck comes off him into the slot more often than it should, and behind a club that gave up the fifth-fewest goals in the league it cost less than it will elsewhere.

The seasons read .9129 on 689 shots, .9018 on 499, .8961 on 1,145 and .9189 on 1,184. Three of those four are below the league rate and the fourth is sixth-best in the book. A reader is entitled to ask which one is him, and 3,517 career shots at .9079 is the most honest available answer.

The Intangibles

Twenty-second overall in 2015, the first round, four seasons, 131 games across Washington and Toronto.

79 wins, 32 regulation losses, ten shutouts.

He is twenty-six. Washington drafted him in the first round, gave him 89 games across three seasons, watched him post an .8961, and let him leave. Toronto signed him and got a season sixth-best in this book.

The question this file leaves open is the only one that matters: was the .9189 the correction or the outlier? The career rate says outlier. The club’s own plus-13.4 says the season was genuinely good rather than lucky. Both are true, and a goaltender who is somewhere between .9079 and .9189 is a perfectly good starter for a club built like this one.

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-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He is positionally sound and does not chase the puck, and the low-percentage shots that beat a scrambling goaltender do not often beat him.”

  • rebound-controlhe lacks it· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is the weakness.”