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.
← 2023-24 edition

This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

70

Joonas Korpisalo

Ottawa Senators Goaltender

A .9138 behind two clubs, and the best save percentage any Ottawa goaltender posted last season by a hundred points.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2015-16CBJ3116114782.600969.919
2016-17CBJ14751382.881401.905
2017-18CBJ18881583.320564.897
2018-19CBJ271073672.950651.897
2019-20CBJ3719125922.6021030.911
2020-21CBJ339137963.300904.894
2021-22CBJ227110784.150634.877
2022-23CBJ/LAK39181441042.8711206.914
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—2219481256113.0146359.904

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

18-14-4 in 39 games, .9138, 2.87, one shutout on 1,206 shots, split between Columbus and Los Angeles.

30.9 shots a night, which is a heavy workload, and a .9138 that is comfortably above the median of .9029 among the forty-two goaltenders who played thirty games.

Set that beside what Ottawa got. Anton Forsberg posted .9021 and Mads Sogaard .8893, and the club’s goaltending was worth minus-18.6 goals against the chances it faced — twenty-seventh in the league. A club that finished twelfth in shot-attempt share and fifteenth in chances gave back eighteen and a half goals in its own crease and finished twenty-first.

Eight seasons and 221 games.

The Finesse Game

6-4 and 200, which is the modern build, and a game that leans on it.

He is a positional goaltender: square, upright, patient, and content to let a clean shot from distance hit him. On a club that concedes as few chances as Ottawa did last season, that is the correct style — the problem in front of him will be the sudden chance rather than the siege.

The rebounds are the honest weakness. He controls the first shot adequately and gives up more second chances than a goaltender of his size should, and a 3.01 career goals-against average across eight seasons is the accumulated arithmetic of it.

He handles the puck rarely and without confidence, which on a blue line as slow as Ottawa’s is a real cost.

The Intangibles

Sixty-second overall in 2012, the third round, and seven seasons in Columbus behind and beside Sergei Bobrovsky and Elvis Merzlikins.

221 games and a career .900-ish record, with last season the best of them.

He is twenty-nine and this is the first job he has been given outright. What the club is buying is the difference between .9138 and the .8974 its two goaltenders combined for — which, across two thousand shots, is thirty goals, and thirty goals is the whole distance between twenty-first and a playoff place.

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 is a positional goaltender: square, upright, patient, and content to let a clean shot from distance hit him.”

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

    “He controls the first shot adequately and gives up more second chances than a goaltender of his size should, and a 3.01 career goals-against average across eight seasons is the accumulated arithmetic of it.”

  • puck-handlinghe lacks it· starts the breakout himself

    “He handles the puck rarely and without confidence, which on a blue line as slow as Ottawa's is a real cost.”