Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2024-25 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 2024-25 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

Six foot six, a career .9129 across 193 games, and the first season that has not gone forward.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21DAL291187632.361710.911
2021-22DAL48301511142.5311331.914
2022-23DAL623711111442.3751776.919
2023-24DAL54351441402.7231476.905
2024-25 so far——————————
Career—19311348234612.51105293.913

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

Fifty-four games, 35-14-4, a .9051 save percentage, a 2.72 average and 3 shutouts on 1,476 shots.

Thirty-five wins on a club that took 113 points. The club’s goaltending came in 10.3 goals worse than the chances faced, 23rd in the league, behind the 4th-best chance suppression in hockey — and a career .9129 across 193 games says a .9051 is a step down from his own standard rather than a description of him.

The Physical Game

He is 6-6 and 225 and takes away the top of the net by standing up rather than by reaching. At that size a clean shot from distance has almost nothing to aim at, and the whole game is built around making a shooter take that shot instead of a better one.

The rebound control is good and behind the fourth-best chance suppression in hockey he is very rarely asked to make two. The lateral recovery is the question — the second play across the crease is slower than it is for a smaller goaltender, and a club that moves the puck east-west will find it.

The Mental Game

A hundred and thirteen wins against forty-eight losses at 25, and a reputation built on a playoff series at 23 in which he was the best player on the ice for seven games.

The .9051 is the first season of his career that has gone backwards, and it happened in front of the same defence that produced the .9129. That is the sort of thing that is either variance or the start of something, and one season cannot tell the difference.

The Intangibles

The 26th pick in 2017 out of Lakeville, three years at Boston University, and a starter’s job at 23 on a hundred-point club.

He is 25 and everything this club is built to do assumes he is a top-five goaltender. Last season he was not one.

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
  • he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “He is 6-6 and 225 and takes away the top of the net by standing up rather than by reaching.”

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

    “The rebound control is good and behind the fourth-best chance suppression in hockey he is very rarely asked to make two.”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The lateral recovery is the question — the second play across the crease is slower than it is for a smaller goaltender, and a club that moves the puck east-west will find it.”