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.

This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

47

James Reimer

Detroit Red Wings Goaltender

Thirteen seasons, four organisations, and an .8899 at 34.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2010-11TOR3720105902.6031134.921
2011-12TOR3414144973.103974.900
2012-13TOR331985762.464995.924
2013-14TOR3612161983.2911095.910
2014-15TOR359161933.1601001.907
2015-16TOR/SJS4017147882.3131128.922
2016-17FLA4318165982.5331222.920
2017-18FLA44221461202.9941373.913
2018-19FLA3613125933.090929.900
2019-20CAR251462612.663712.914
2020-21CAR221552592.660627.906
2021-22SJS481917101292.9011450.911
2022-23SJS43122181473.4831335.890
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—4762041696112492.872813975.911

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

43 games for San Jose, 12-21-8, .8899, 3.48, three shutouts on 1,335 shots.

That is the worst full season of his career and it came behind one of the worst defensive clubs in the league. Three shutouts in a season with an .8899 is an unusual combination and describes the variance rather well.

Thirteen seasons, 476 games, and a career save percentage that has been between .900 and .924 in eleven of them.

The Finesse Game

6-2 and 200, which is small for a modern goaltender, and the game has always been reactive rather than positional: he is athletic, he battles, and he makes a proportion of his saves in ways a technique coach would not draw.

The glove has been the strength for thirteen years. The rebound control is ordinary and the puck-handling is a genuine weakness — he does not start breakouts and clubs have learned to forecheck him.

He tracks through traffic well, which is the skill that has kept him employed behind bad defensive clubs for most of his career.

The Intangibles

99th overall in 2006, out of Morweena, Manitoba — a Mennonite community of a few hundred people — and thirteen NHL seasons since.

He has been a starter in Toronto, a tandem goaltender in Florida and Carolina, and a workhorse on two bad San Jose teams. Detroit signed him at 35 to split the net with Ville Husso, whose .8958 last season was barely better.

That is the plan, and the club’s goaltending graded 28th in the league before either of them changed.

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
  • 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 tracks through traffic well, which is the skill that has kept him employed behind bad defensive clubs for most of his career.”

  • puck-handlinghe lacks it· starts the breakout himself

    “the puck-handling is a genuine weakness — he does not start breakouts and clubs have learned to forecheck him”

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

    “The rebound control is ordinary”