Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2023-24 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 2023-24 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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32

Jonathan Quick

New York Rangers Goaltender

Seven hundred and fifty-three games, and a save percentage forty-first of forty-two.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2007-08LAK312093.84062.855
2008-09LAK44211821032.4841200.914
2009-10LAK72392471802.5441927.907
2010-11LAK61352231342.2461631.918
2011-12LAK693521131331.95101863.929
2012-13LAK3718134872.451889.902
2013-14LAK49271741002.0761183.915
2014-15LAK723622131562.2461896.918
2015-16LAK68402351492.2251820.918
2016-17LAK17852352.262421.917
2017-18LAK64332831472.4051867.921
2018-19LAK46162371493.3821329.888
2019-20LAK42162241172.7911224.904
2020-21LAK221192582.862566.897
2021-22LAK46231391162.5921284.910
2022-23LAK/VGK41161561273.4121080.882
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—7533752778418002.475820242.911

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

16-15-6 in 41 games, .8824, 3.41, two shutouts on 1,080 shots, split between Los Angeles and Vegas.

The .8824 is forty-first of the forty-two goaltenders who played thirty games, against a median of .9029. Only Elvis Merzlikins stopped a smaller share.

26.3 shots a night, which is a light workload, behind two clubs that both made the playoffs. There is no version of the season where the number is explained by what was in front of him.

Sixteen seasons, 753 games, a 2.47 career goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-1 and 219, and a technique that has been unorthodox for sixteen years.

He is an athlete rather than a positional goaltender — deep, reactive, and reliant on getting a pad or a limb to a puck he has not squared up to. At his best it produced saves that nobody else in the league made. At thirty-seven it produces rebounds.

The puck-handling is the one part that has not gone. He plays the puck behind the net as well as any goaltender of his generation and it functions as a third defenceman on a breakout.

Where the file has collapsed is the first save. An .8824 across a thousand shots is not a slump and cannot be read as one.

The Intangibles

Seventy-second overall in 2005, the third round, and sixteen seasons in Los Angeles before the trade that ended them.

753 games and two Stanley Cups, and a career goals-against average of 2.47 that the last two seasons have been steadily pulling upward.

He is thirty-seven and this is a backup’s job behind a Vezina winner. What the club is buying is twenty starts and a room, and the numbers say it should not be more than twenty.

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
  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
  • 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.

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “He plays the puck behind the net as well as any goaltender of his generation and it functions as a third defenceman on a breakout.”

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

    “At his best it produced saves that nobody else in the league made. At thirty-seven it produces rebounds.”

  • plays-aggressivepresent and ordinary· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He is an athlete rather than a positional goaltender — deep, reactive, and reliant on getting a pad or a limb to a puck he has not squared up to.”