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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29

Jake Oettinger

Dallas Stars Goaltender

A .9144 in 48 games and a .9544 across seven playoff games against Calgary — 272 saves on 285 shots.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21DAL291187632.361710.911
2021-22DAL48301511142.5311331.914
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—77412381772.4622041.913

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

48 games, 30-15-1, .9144 and 2.53 with one shutout on 1,331 shots. Fifteenth of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more — a good number and not a remarkable one.

Then seven games against Calgary. 285 shots, 272 saves, 13 goals against: .9544, with a shutout, in a series Dallas lost in overtime of the seventh. Calgary took 60 per cent of the expected goals across those seven games and 60 per cent of the unblocked attempts. He faced 40.7 shots a night for two weeks and the series went the distance because of it.

Dallas as a club finished 12th in goaltending against the chances faced, at plus-3.4 goals. That is the honest frame: the regular season was slightly above the shots, and the fortnight after it was something else entirely.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 225, which is at the top of the range the position now selects for, and the reason a lot of the .9144 is simply that he covers the net.

Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender’s glove, his push or how deep he plays. What it measures is shots and goals, and at 1,331 shots the number is stable enough to say he was better than the league average and not by much.

The playoff figure is the opposite: 285 shots is a fortnight, and a fortnight of .9544 is the single least repeatable measurement in hockey. It happened. It is not a forecast.

The Mental Game

Twenty-three years old, in his second NHL season, playing forty-eight games behind a blue line whose best defenceman is 37 and whose chance share was 15th in the league.

The seventh game was level after regulation and he lost it in overtime. Nothing in the data says how a 23-year-old carries that into a next season, and this book will not pretend otherwise.

The Intangibles

Twenty-sixth overall in 2017, and 77 NHL games at 23 with a career .9133.

The two seasons are consistent — .9113 on 710 shots as a rookie and .9144 on 1,331 last year — which is the most useful thing on the page. A young goaltender whose second season matches his first is a much safer bet than one whose second season is a leap, and Dallas has the first kind.

The crease behind him is a 30-year-old journeyman with a career .9058. This is his net for as long as he wants it, which is a lot of weight for a 23-year-old and the reason the .9544 will be quoted at him all season.

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.

  • tracks-trafficpresent and ordinary· finds it through a screen

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