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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36

John Gibson

Anaheim Ducks Goaltender

An .8876 in forty-six games, from a goaltender who posted a .9257 six years ago.

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
2022-23ANA53143182003.9911983.899
2023-24ANA46132721513.5401343.888
2024-25 so far——————————
Career—4771932066113152.902414609.910

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

13-27-2 with an .8876, a 3.54 average and no shutouts in 46 games, facing 1,343 shots.

It is the worst save percentage of his career and the fourth straight season below .9050. The club’s goaltending as a whole came in 8.4 goals worse than the chances faced, 21st in the league, behind a defence that was 24th at suppressing them.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 209. He plays deep in the crease, square and technically exact, and the frame takes the top of the net away without him having to move for it. The stance has not changed in a decade and neither has the athleticism — the glove is still quick and he still makes the save nobody else in the building makes two or three times a month.

The rebound control is where the decline shows. The second chance comes back into the slot rather than to the corner, and on a club conceding 174 goals at five-on-five that is a great many second chances.

He tracks pucks through traffic as well as he ever did.

The Mental Game

Four straight seasons below .9050 behind four straight bad defences, and the honest difficulty is that nobody can separate the two. He has faced 14,609 career shots and 1,343 of them last season alone.

What is visible is that the compete has not gone. He does not give up on a game that is three down in the second, and a goaltender who has lost 206 NHL games for one organisation could be forgiven for it.

The Intangibles

Thirty-ninth overall in 2011 and 477 games, 193 wins and a career .9100, all of it here. He was a first-team all-star candidate in 2017-18 at a .9257 and was, for two or three seasons, genuinely among the best goaltenders in the world.

He is 31. Every game of his career has been played in front of a defence like this one, and the question the next two seasons answer is whether that was the cause or the excuse.

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 the crease, square and technically exact**, and the frame takes the top of the net away without him having to move for it.”

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

    “**The rebound control is where the decline shows.** The second chance comes back into the slot rather than to the corner, and on a club conceding 174 goals at five-on-five that is a great many second chances.”

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “**He tracks pucks through traffic as well as he ever did.**”