Armchair Hockey Scout

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2022-23 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 2022-23 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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34

Kaapo Kahkonen

San Jose Sharks Goaltender

Sixty-five NHL games and 1,920 shots, and a .9119 that is 21st of the 53 who played twenty-five.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20MIN5311152.960172.913
2020-21MIN241680682.882692.902
2021-22MIN/SJS3614144932.8701056.912
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—65332351762.8821920.908

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

36 games between Minnesota and San Jose, 14-14-4, a .9119 save percentage and a 2.87 goals-against, no shutouts on 1,056 shots. That is 21st of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. One hundred and ninth overall in 2014 by Minnesota — the fourth round — three seasons, 65 games.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 217 pounds, and 26 years old with 1,920 career shots.

The three seasons read .9128 across 172 shots, .9017 across 692, and .9119 across 1,056. Career .9083.

The most recent is the largest and the second-best, and the middle one is the only sample of any size below league average. A hundred and eleven points of spread across three years, on a total that is still smaller than Tristan Jarry faced in one season.

Thirty-six games is a career high by twelve and it is the first year he has faced more than a thousand shots.

The Mental Game

San Jose rated 20th in the league in goaltending at minus-8.9, from three goaltenders. James Reimer took forty-eight games at .9110, Adin Hill twenty-five at .9059 and Kahkonen twelve here after arriving from Minnesota.

Minnesota, where the other twenty-four games came, finished 2nd in the league in expected goals against per 60 at even strength. San Jose finished 18th on the same measure and 31st in attempt share. The two halves of his season were played behind very different structures and the record does not separate them.

He arrives at a club whose skaters held the puck less than every team but Arizona.

The Intangibles

Nothing in the file speaks to technique, rebound control or how he plays the puck.

What it measures is 1,920 shots at .9083 from a 26-year-old — enough to say he is an NHL goaltender and not enough to say what kind.

James Reimer is 34 and has never played fifty games in a season. Adin Hill has gone to Vegas. For the first time there is a crease here without an established starter in it, and a 26-year-old with sixty-five games is the most likely occupant.