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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74

Juuse Saros

Nashville Predators Goaltender

Two thousand and ninety-nine shots — the most in the league and the only goaltender above two thousand — from the shortest man in the book.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2015-16NSH101033.10023.870
2016-17NSH211083472.351614.923
2017-18NSH261157612.453810.925
2018-19NSH3117102742.623870.915
2019-20NSH4017124982.7041142.914
2020-21NSH3621111782.2831073.927
2021-22NSH67382531732.6442107.918
2022-23NSH64332371712.6922099.918
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—28614795277052.58208738.919

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

33-23-7 in 64 games, .9185, 2.69, two shutouts on 2,099 shots.

Two thousand and ninety-nine shots is the most faced by any goaltender in the league, and he is the only one above two thousand. That is 32.8 a night across sixty-four appearances.

Nashville’s goaltending value finished third in the league at plus-25.3, on a club that allowed the twenty-seventh-most expected goals per sixty at even strength and finished twelfth in actual goals against. The distance between those two numbers is him, and it is the largest single reason a club with the sixth-worst finishing in the league still made ninety-two points.

Eight seasons, all of them in Nashville, and a .9185 that is his fourth straight above .9140.

The Finesse Game

5-11 and 180 — the shortest goaltender in this book, and the busiest.

Everything about the style follows from the size. He cannot fill a net by standing in it, so he plays a compact, low, aggressive game built on getting square early and on lateral speed that almost nobody at the position matches. The recovery from post to post is the specific skill, and it is why a 5-11 goaltender faces two thousand shots and stops 91.85 per cent of them.

He tracks pucks through traffic well and holds his depth rather than retreating into the blue paint, which is the only way a smaller goaltender survives the volume Nashville concedes.

Two shutouts in sixty-four games is a low figure and it belongs to the club: he was rarely given a night where nothing came.

The Intangibles

Ninety-ninth overall in 2013 out of Finland, five seasons alongside Pekka Rinne, and the job since 2020-21.

Sixty-four games behind a club that concedes what Nashville concedes is a workload that has ended careers, and he has now done it twice: 67 games in 2021-22 and 64 in this one.

The honest projection is that a 5-11 goaltender taking two thousand shots a season is running a risk the club has decided to accept, because there is no version of Nashville’s season that works without him. He is the reason a club with the twenty-seventh-best defensive record finished twelfth in goals against, and that sentence is the whole chapter.

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

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.

  • lateral-recoverya strength· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The recovery from post to post is the specific skill, and it is why a 5-11 goaltender faces two thousand shots and stops 91.85 per cent of them.”

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “He tracks pucks through traffic well and holds his depth rather than retreating into the blue paint, which is the only way a smaller goaltender survives the volume Nashville concedes.”

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

    “He cannot fill a net by standing in it, so he plays a compact, low, aggressive game built on getting square early and on lateral speed that almost nobody at the position matches.”