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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36

John Gibson

Anaheim Ducks Goaltender

Three straight seasons at .904 or worse behind a club that has now sold its two best defencemen — and his backup was thirteen points of save percentage better in the same crease.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2013-14ANA330041.33187.954
2014-15ANA231380582.601674.914
2015-16ANA4021134792.074992.920
2016-17ANA52251691092.2261437.924
2017-18ANA60311871392.4341872.926
2018-19ANA58262281532.8421838.917
2019-20ANA51202651493.0011552.904
2020-21ANA3591971012.9831042.903
2021-22ANA561826111723.1911789.904
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—378166148519642.672311283.915

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

56 games, 18-26-11, a .9039 save percentage and a 3.19 goals-against average, with 1 shutout on 1,789 shots faced.

This is the third consecutive season at .904 or worse. He was .9257 in 2017-18, .9168 in 2018-19, and then .9040, .9031 and .9039. Four seasons is no longer a slump.

Anaheim’s goaltending came in 10.5 goals worse than the chances it faced, 21st in the league, and the club conceded 271 goals, 23rd. The defence in front of him ranked 25th in the league at suppressing expected goals against at even strength.

And Anthony Stolarz posted a .9172 in 28 games behind exactly the same defence. That is the uncomfortable number on this page. It does not prove anything on its own — 809 shots is not a season, and a backup picks up the softer half of the schedule — but it is the one comparison available that holds the club constant, and it does not go Gibson’s way.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 209. He plays deep in his crease and square to the puck, and he does not chase it — a positional goaltender rather than an athletic one, which is what carried a .9146 career line through eight seasons of mostly bad hockey.

The rebound control is the flaw and it always has been. On a club whose defence does not clear its own crease, the second chance goes to an unmarked forward more often than it does anywhere else, and the weakness and the situation compound each other.

The Mental Game

Fifty-six games behind the 23rd-ranked defence in the league, on a club that traded its two best defencemen in March and got worse in front of him after the deadline rather than better. Thirty-two shots a night with no forecheck ahead of you is a specific kind of test and the results have not held.

What is genuinely hard to read from here is whether the technique has gone or the situation has taken it. The measured record cannot separate those two things and neither can anybody watching, because the last time he played behind an average defence was 2018.

The Intangibles

Thirty-ninth overall in 2011, drafted by this club, 378 games and 23 shutouts for it, and a career .9146 that was among the best in hockey when he was twenty-four.

He is 29, signed through 2027, on the longest contract in the building. A rebuilding club with an expensive goaltender in decline has two bad options and no good one: pay him to be the reason young defencemen do not get embarrassed, or find out what he is worth while there is still a case to be made for him. Anaheim has not chosen yet.

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.

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He plays deep in his crease and square to the puck, and he does not chase it”

  • rebound-controlhe lacks it· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is the flaw and it always has been”