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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30

Ilya Sorokin

New York Islanders Goaltender

The 2nd-best save percentage of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games, on the club with the 3rd-worst chance share in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21NYI221363462.173563.918
2021-22NYI52261881232.4071643.925
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—743924111692.33102206.923

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

52 games, 26-18-8, a .9251 save percentage and a 2.40 goals-against, seven shutouts on 1,643 shots. That is 2nd of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games, behind only Igor Shesterkin.

Seven shutouts is 2nd in the league, behind Jacob Markstrom’s nine.

Seventy-eighth overall in 2014, two NHL seasons, 74 games.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 189 pounds, which is the modern build for the position and unusually light for the height.

The record is short and both halves of it are good. .9183 across 563 shots in 2020-21 and .9251 across 1,643 in 2021-22. Career .9234 on 2,206 shots.

Two seasons is not a level and this one is a large enough sample to be taken seriously on its own — 1,643 shots is more than most starters see.

The Mental Game

The club in front of him was among the worst in the league at keeping the puck away. The Islanders finished 29th in attempt share, 24th in chance share and 27th in expected goals against per 60 at even strength.

And they finished 3rd in the league in goaltending at plus-22.2 goals saved above expectation. At five-on-five they conceded 160 goals against an expectation of 182.2.

Twenty-two goals is the entire difference between this club and a much worse one. New York allowed 237 goals, 10th-fewest in the league, off the 27th-ranked defensive rate. There is no other way to read that gap.

Semyon Varlamov took the other 31 games at .9110 and was 23rd of the 53, so the club figure is not evenly shared.

The Intangibles

He is 27, in his second NHL season, and has already produced the second-best save percentage in the league behind a bottom-five possession club.

Nothing in this file measures how he plays a rebound, whether he finds a puck through traffic, or what he does on a second chance. What it measures is that the Islanders were outshot and outchanced all year and finished 10th in goals against.

The skaters produced a 20th-place record and the crease is why it was not a 28th-place one.