Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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8

Johnathan Kovacevic

New Jersey Devils Defense

Six foot five, plus-11 in Montreal, and eleven goals of goaltending on his ice on a club that finished 28th.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22WPG4000+1200070.010:49
2022-23MTL7731215+339000923.317:25
2023-24MTL626713+11420004613.016:31
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—14391928+15830001456.216:51

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

62 games in Montreal, 6 goals and 7 assists for 13 points, 42 penalty minutes, 16:31 a night and plus-11. He took 46.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 888 minutes, the 29th percentile, and his ice went 39-29 against an expectation of 34.91-40.15, all of it with the Canadiens.

Four goals of finishing above what the chances were worth and eleven fewer conceded than they called for. Montreal had the fourth-best goaltending in the league and a 29th-percentile chance share turned into a plus-11 because of it — the number to be careful with here is the plus-minus.

The Finesse Game

46 shots at a median of 51 feet with 68 per cent from beyond 40, converted at 13.0 per cent against a career 6.21.

19 career assists in 143 games. Six goals on forty-six shots is double his career rate and will not repeat. There is very little puck-moving; he takes it off the wall, puts it out, and goes back to the front of his own net.

The Physical Game

He is 6-5 and 223 and defends with reach and size, and nobody gets to the paint past him easily.

83 career penalty minutes in 143 games is a moderate rate. He clears the crease, blocks shots and kills penalties, and is hard to move from anywhere.

The Intangibles

A third-round pick in 2017 by Winnipeg, out of Hamilton, Ontario, three seasons across two organisations, and 28 points in 143 games.

He is 27 and has 143 games. A right-handed 6-5 defenceman who kills penalties is a useful thing to have and the chance share says he is a third pair rather than a second.

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.

  • measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
  • 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.

  • hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best

    39% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 8th percentile among defencemen

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it

  • defends-with-reacha strength· takes the puck before the contact happens

    “He is 6-5 and 223 and defends with reach and size, and nobody gets to the paint past him easily.”

  • clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net

    “He clears the crease, blocks shots and kills penalties, and is hard to move from anywhere.”

  • shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it

    “He clears the crease, blocks shots and kills penalties, and is hard to move from anywhere.”

  • penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short

    “He clears the crease, blocks shots and kills penalties, and is hard to move from anywhere.”

  • hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand

    “He clears the crease, blocks shots and kills penalties, and is hard to move from anywhere.”

  • transitionhe lacks it· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “There is very little puck-moving; he takes it off the wall, puts it out, and goes back to the front of his own net.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 888 minutes

Expected goals
46.5%
29th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
47.8%
33rd pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 39 for, 29 against. Expected: 34.9 and 40.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
24th
Numbers
29th

The two rank him within 5 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.

Both bars are percentiles among the 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2023-24 · 62 games

Top speed
21.4 mph
36th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.7

Bursts over 20 mph
0.13 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.22 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
95.1 mph
72nd pct

one shot; the league's average best is 90.2

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2023-24 with MTL · 888 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2023-24

The club
MTL took 46.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.5% — 0.4 above the club he did it on.
The role
Second pair, 888 minutes at five-on-five — 47th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Jordan Harris49.3%45.3%46.8%
Brendan Gallagher51.6%44.4%49.8%
Jake Evans51.6%44.7%43.1%

49.3% together, 45.3% for him apart and 46.8% for Harris apart. He was worse away from Harris, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Harris did.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

73 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 36 feet. 12% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 68% from beyond forty.