Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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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32

Jack Campbell

Edmonton Oilers Goaltender

A .9140 across 49 games — 17th of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 or more — behind a club that took the 5th-best chance share in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2013-14DAL101066.00047.872
2016-17LAK100000.00051.000
2017-18LAK5202112.480145.924
2018-19LAK3110141612.302845.928
2019-20LAK/TOR2611123732.800761.904
2020-21TOR221732462.152585.921
2021-22TOR4931961232.6451430.914
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—1357139143202.5393818.916

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

49 games, 31-9-6, .9140 and 2.64 with five shutouts on 1,430 shots for Toronto. Seventeenth of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more.

Read it against the club. Toronto took 54.8 per cent of the chances at five-on-five, fifth in the league, and scored 315 goals. Its goaltending as a whole still came in 29th at minus-26.9 goals against the chances faced — which is to say the shots he faced were few and the goals still went in.

Edmonton’s goaltending finished 17th at minus-3.4. He is not obviously an improvement on that and the club has paid as though he is.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 200, which is at the size the position now selects for.

Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender’s glove, his push, his rebound control or how deep he plays. What it has is shots and goals, and 1,430 shots is a real sample.

The career record is 135 games and a .9162 across seven seasons, most of them as somebody’s backup and the last two as a starter.

The Mental Game

Thirty years old, arriving at a club that went to the conference final and has the best player in the world.

Toronto conceded 253 goals last season and Edmonton 252 — the workload is not the change. What changes is that Edmonton killed penalties at the 27th-best rate in the league and Toronto at the 4th, and a penalty kill is where a goaltender’s season is made or lost.

Nothing in this repo speaks to how a goaltender handles a market, a contract or a spring. This book will not pretend it does.

The Intangibles

Eleventh overall in 2010, and 135 NHL games at 30 with a career .9162 — the shape of a first-round goaltender who took a decade to arrive.

Two seasons as a number one, both good and neither long: 22 games at .9214 in 2020-21 and 49 at .9140 last year. Seventy-one games in two years is the whole of the evidence that he can carry a season.

Edmonton has Stuart Skinner behind him with fourteen career games. The club has bet a conference finalist’s crease on a 30-year-old with two starter’s seasons, and the numbers say that is a bet rather than a solution.

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.

  • 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.

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender's glove, his push, his rebound control or how deep he plays.”