Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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50

Jordan Binnington

St. Louis Blues Goaltender

An .8938 behind the sixth-worst chance share in the league, and a .9269 four years ago that will not stop being quoted.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2015-16STL100014.6904.750
2018-19STL322451591.895807.927
2019-20STL50301371262.5631430.912
2020-21STL42181481082.6501200.910
2021-22STL37181441123.1321135.901
2022-23STL61272761943.3121826.894
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—22311773266002.78126402.906

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

27-27-6 in 61 games, .8938, 3.31, two shutouts on 1,826 shots.

29.9 shots a night behind a club that finished twenty-seventh in the league in five-on-five shot-attempt share and twenty-seventh in chances, and twenty-sixth in expected goals against per sixty.

St. Louis’s goaltending was worth minus-5.5 goals against the chances it faced, nineteenth in the league. That is the number that matters and it is a long way from the raw save percentage: on the shots he actually faced, the crease was slightly below average rather than catastrophic. The club conceded 301 goals because it conceded the chances.

Six seasons, 223 games, a career .9063.

The Finesse Game

6-2 and 172 pounds — the lightest goaltender in this book, six under Alexandar Georgiev — and it is visible in the way he plays: he is quick rather than large, and covers the net by getting there rather than by filling it.

He plays aggressively, high in his crease, and the trade is the one every goaltender of that description makes: the first shot is cut down and the cross-ice pass finds a net he has to travel to.

The rebound control is adequate. The recurring goal against him is the second shot from the far side after a lateral play, and behind a club that allowed the sixth-most chances in the league there were a great many of those.

The seasons read .9269 on 807 shots, .9119 on 1,430, .9100 on 1,200, .9013 on 1,135 and .8938 on 1,826. Four consecutive declines across five seasons, and 6,402 career shots.

How much of that is the club is the question, and this book can answer part of it. The goaltending measure has him at minus-5.5 against the chances faced last season, which is a below-average season and not a disaster; the raw .8938 reads far worse than that because the chances were far worse. Both readings are true and the second one is the fairer.

The Intangibles

Eighty-eighth overall in 2011, the third round, and six seasons, all of them here.

The rookie season is the one everybody remembers: 32 games at .9269 and a Stanley Cup in 2019 after a call-up in January.

He is thirty, on a long contract, on a club that has traded three of its best forwards and finished twenty-seventh in chance share. The four seasons since 2018-19 have each been worse than the last, and there is no version of the next two in which he is given an easier team to play behind.

What this file records is a goaltender whose career average is .9063, whose trend is downward, and whose defensive support is going to get worse before it gets better.

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-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He plays aggressively, high in his crease, and the trade is the one every goaltender of that description makes: the first shot is cut down and the cross-ice pass finds a net he has to travel to.”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The recurring goal against him is the second shot from the far side after a lateral play, and behind a club that allowed the sixth-most chances in the league there were a great many of those.”