This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Joel Hofer
St. Louis Blues Goaltender
Six-foot-five, eight NHL games in two seasons, and a .9050 in six of them.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | STL | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 3.07 | 0 | 50 | .880 |
| 2022-23 | STL | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 17 | 3.22 | 0 | 179 | .905 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 23 | 3.18 | 0 | 229 | .900 |
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
3-1-1 in 6 games, .9050, 3.22, no shutouts on 179 shots.
29.8 shots a night across six appearances, which is a fortnight of a starter’s work.
Two seasons, 8 games, a career .8996 on 229 shots.
The Finesse Game
6-5 and 193 pounds, which is tall and very light, and the game is built on the height: he takes the top of the net away standing up and challenges very little.
He plays deep and lets the shot come, which at 6-5 is the efficient choice and makes the second save the question, as it always is with a goaltender who covers the net by size rather than by movement.
The puck-handling is competent rather than a weapon.
Two NHL seasons read .8800 on 50 shots and .9050 on 179. Two hundred and twenty-nine career shots is not a record and nothing in this file should be read as one.
What can be said is that he is twenty-three, the club drafted him in the fourth round, and the starter in front of him is thirty and declining. The opportunity is the most concrete thing here.
The Intangibles
A hundred and seventh overall in 2018, the fourth round, two seasons, eight games, all of them here.
He is twenty-three, which for a goaltender is barely started, and he has spent both of those seasons in the American league with a handful of call-ups.
On a club that has begun a rebuild and has a declining starter on a long contract, the arithmetic points one way. Whether the record supports it is a question for the next two seasons and not this 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
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.
“He plays deep and lets the shot come, which at 6-5 is the efficient choice and makes the second save the question, as it always is with a goaltender who covers the net by size rather than by movement.”
“The puck-handling is competent rather than a weapon.”