Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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41

Jaroslav Halak

New York Rangers Goaltender

Fifteen thousand seven hundred career shots across sixteen seasons, and a .9025 in seventeen games at 37.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2006-07MTL161060442.892469.906
2007-08MTL6211102.111151.934
2008-09MTL3418141922.8611077.915
2009-10MTL45261351052.4051386.924
2010-11STL57272171362.4871518.910
2011-12STL4626127901.9761211.926
2012-13STL16651292.143286.899
2013-14STL/WSH52291371102.2551385.921
2014-15NYI59381741442.4361673.914
2015-16NYI3618134802.303984.919
2016-17NYI281295752.802885.915
2017-18NYI54202661613.1911744.908
2018-19BOS4022114902.3451158.922
2019-20BOS311866732.393905.919
2020-21BOS19964462.532482.905
2021-22VAN17472392.940400.902
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—5562851806413242.495215714.916

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

17 games for Vancouver, 4-7-2, a .9025 save percentage and a 2.94 goals-against, no shutouts on 400 shots.

Sixteen seasons, 556 games, 15,714 shots faced, a career .9157 and fifty-two shutouts.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 189 pounds. Two other goaltenders in this book stand 5-11, and at 37 he is among the oldest.

The career record is one of the longest in the edition and it does not move much. He has finished between .9046 and .9257 in thirteen of his sixteen seasons. The three exceptions came in years of six, sixteen and seventeen games.

Seventeen games and 400 shots is not enough to know what .9025 means, and against 15,714 career shots at .9157 the honest reading is that this was a small sample below his level.

The Mental Game

Vancouver finished 1st in the league in goaltending at plus-23.5 goals saved above expectation — the best figure in hockey — and almost none of it is his. Thatcher Demko took 64 games at .9146.

He arrives to back up the goaltender who posted the best save percentage in the league. Igor Shesterkin played 53 games; Alexandar Georgiev took 32 at .8978 and has gone to Colorado.

Replacing a .8978 with a career .9157 is a real if small improvement, and it is roughly the whole of what this signing is for.

The Intangibles

He is 37 and has faced fifteen thousand shots. Fifty-two career shutouts and 285 wins, both of them accumulated across seven clubs.

Nothing here measures the technique or the temperament of a sixteen-year professional. What it measures is a career figure a shade above league average, a seventeen-game season well below it, and a job description that asks for about twenty starts behind the best goaltender in the league.

On a club whose record rests entirely on one crease, the quality of the backup is not a small question, and a .9157 across sixteen seasons is a better answer than most clubs have.