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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30

Ilya Sorokin

New York Islanders Goaltender

The third-best save percentage in the league, on a club that finished nineteenth in chances at both ends.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21NYI221363462.173563.918
2021-22NYI52261881232.4071643.925
2022-23NYI62312271402.3461838.924
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1367046183092.34164044.924

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

31-22-7 in 62 games, .9238, 2.34, six shutouts on 1,838 shots.

Only Linus Ullmark and Filip Gustavsson stopped a higher share of what they faced among the forty-two goaltenders who played thirty games. He did it on 29.6 shots a night behind a club that finished nineteenth in the league in five-on-five chances allowed.

The club-level figure is the one to hold on to. New York’s goaltending was worth plus-26.8 goals against the chances it faced, second in the league, on a team whose expected-goals rate at even strength was twentieth going forward and nineteenth going back. The Islanders finished with ninety-three points and this is the entire mechanism.

Three seasons, 136 NHL games, a 2.34 career goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 189, which is lean for the modern position and is the shape of the game he plays.

He is deep, square and enormously patient. He does not commit to the first shot in a sequence, which is what lets him survive the second and third, and the six shutouts on a club that concedes as much as this one does are the visible end of it.

The specific skill is the post-to-post recovery. He gets across on the second play faster than almost anybody at the position and does it without losing his depth, which is why a club that gives up the nineteenth-most chances in the league finished fifth in goals against.

He reads screens well and fights through them rather than around them. Where the technique is ordinary is with the puck: he handles it competently and no more, and on a blue line as slow as this one that costs a few zone exits a night.

The Intangibles

Seventy-eighth overall in 2014, and six years between the draft and a first North American game, which came at twenty-five.

The career line is 136 games and a 2.34 goals-against average across three seasons, two of them behind clubs that finished outside the top twenty in chance suppression.

What this book would want to know and cannot is how much of the plus-26.8 is repeatable. Goaltending is the one position where a season of surplus predicts the next one least well, and a club whose forwards finished twentieth in chance generation has no second plan if it does not.

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
  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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.

  • lateral-recoverya strength· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “He gets across on the second play faster than almost anybody at the position and does it without losing his depth, which is why a club that gives up the nineteenth-most chances in the league finished fifth in goals against.”

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He is deep, square and enormously patient.”

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “He reads screens well and fights through them rather than around them.”

  • puck-handlingpresent and ordinary· starts the breakout himself

    “Where the technique is ordinary is with the puck: he handles it competently and no more, and on a blue line as slow as this one that costs a few zone exits a night.”