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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34

Kaapo Kahkonen

San Jose Sharks Goaltender

An .8825 in front of the worst goaltending record in the league, and three seasons above .900 before it.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20MIN5311152.960172.913
2020-21MIN241680682.882692.902
2021-22MIN/SJS3614144932.8701056.912
2022-23SJS3792071353.8511149.882
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1024243123113.2333069.899

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

9-20-7 in 37 games, .8825, 3.85, one shutout on 1,149 shots.

31.1 shots a night behind a club that finished twenty-first in five-on-five shot-attempt share and twenty-second in chances.

San Jose’s goaltending was worth minus-41.9 goals against the chances it faced — thirty-second in the league, and nearly eight goals worse than the thirty-first club. The club’s skaters scored 168 goals at five-on-five against an expectation of 168.1, which is as close to exact as the model gets. They conceded 220 against an expectation of 178.1.

That is the season. San Jose finished twenty-ninth with the seventeenth-best finishing in the league and the worst goaltending in it, and the largest single share of the second number belongs here.

Four seasons, 102 games, a career .8987.

The Finesse Game

6-2 and 217 pounds, and a conventional, technically sound game that has never been the problem.

He plays square and slightly deep, tracks the first shot well, and is beaten on the second one. The rebound control is the weakest part of the file and it is the part a club conceding 30 shots a night can least afford: pucks come off him into the slot rather than to the corner.

The seasons read .9128 on 172 shots, .9017 on 692, .9119 on 1,056 and .8825 on 1,149. The first three are the record of an ordinary NHL goaltender and the fourth is not.

How much of the drop is his is the question this book cannot answer cleanly, and it is worth being explicit about why. A save percentage is a measurement of the goaltender and of the shots he faced, and this repo can separate the two only at the club level. What it says at that level is that San Jose’s crease was forty-two goals worse than the chances warranted, which is far too large to be shot quality alone and far too large to be one man alone.

The honest reading is a career backup who was given a starter’s workload on the worst defensive club in the league and did not survive it.

The Intangibles

A hundred and ninth overall in 2014, the fourth round, four seasons, 102 games across Minnesota and San Jose.

He arrived at twenty-three behind an established starter, played 24 and 36 games in his two Minnesota seasons at a shade over .900, and was traded into a rebuild.

He is twenty-seven. A .8987 career save percentage across 102 games is a small enough sample that the 37 games above dominate it, which is the trap in reading this file at all: strip out last season and he is a .9083 goaltender on 1,920 shots, and there is no principled reason to strip it out.

What is certain is the workload ahead. San Jose has traded its best defenceman and has no obvious replacement, and the man in this crease is going to face a great many shots.

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.

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

    “The rebound control is the weakest part of the file and it is the part a club conceding 30 shots a night can least afford: pucks come off him into the slot rather than to the corner.”

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He plays square and slightly deep, tracks the first shot well, and is beaten on the second one.”