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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29

Jake Oettinger

Dallas Stars Goaltender

Three NHL seasons and a save percentage that has risen in every one.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21DAL291187632.361710.911
2021-22DAL48301511142.5311331.914
2022-23DAL623711111442.3751776.919
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1397834193212.4273817.916

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

62 games, 37-11-11, .9189 — seventh in the league among goaltenders who played 25 games — with a 2.37 average and five shutouts on 1,776 shots. The 37 wins were tied for third.

The sequence is the report: .9113, .9144, .9189 across three seasons, in 29, 48 and 62 games. It has gone up every year while the workload has gone up every year, which is the opposite of what usually happens and the exact mirror of Elvis Merzlikins in Columbus, whose figure has fallen in each of four.

Dallas’s goaltending graded plus-11.9, seventh in the league, and the club finished third in goals against.

The Finesse Game

6-6 and 225, and the method is positional to a degree that is unusual in a goaltender that size: he plays at the top of his crease, square, and lets the puck hit him rather than reaching for it.

The rebound control is the strongest part of it. He kills pucks into the corners rather than back into the slot, which on a club built to defend the middle of the ice is precisely the skill that club needs.

Against lateral plays he is good rather than exceptional — the size means the recovery across the crease takes a beat — and the goals against him tend to come from the second play rather than the first shot.

The puck-handling is competent and Dallas do not build breakouts through him.

The Intangibles

26th overall in 2017 out of Lakeville, three years at Boston University, and a first NHL season at 22.

He is 24, has 139 NHL games, and has been the starting goaltender of a Conference Final club. Everything in the record points the same way.

The caution worth writing down is the one this book applies to every goaltender: three seasons is not a career, and a save percentage is the noisiest number in hockey.

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.

  • rebound-controla strength· where the second chance ends up

    “He kills pucks into the corners rather than back into the slot, which on a club built to defend the middle of the ice is precisely the skill that club needs.”

  • plays-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “he plays at the top of his crease, square, and lets the puck hit him rather than reaching for it”

  • lateral-recoverypresent and ordinary· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “Against lateral plays he is good rather than exceptional — the size means the recovery across the crease takes a beat”