Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2024-25 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 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

34

Kaapo Kahkonen

Colorado Avalanche Goaltender

Seven wins and twenty-four losses in San Jose, signed to back up a goaltender who posted an .8966.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2019-20MIN5311152.960172.913
2020-21MIN241680682.882692.902
2021-22MIN/SJS3614144932.8701056.912
2022-23SJS3792071353.8511149.882
2023-24SJS/NJD3772431163.6411139.898
2024-25 so far——————————
Career—1394967154273.3344208.898

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

Thirty-seven games in San Jose, 7-24-3, an .8982 save percentage, a 3.64 average and 1 shutout on 1,139 shots.

San Jose finished last in the league and a 3.64 average behind that club is not a verdict. An .8982 is: it is almost exactly his career rate of .8985 across 139 games, and it is not a number that fixes a crease ranked 24th in the league.

The Physical Game

He is 6-2 and 217 and heavy for a goaltender, and he plays a square, positional game that depends on being in the right place rather than on getting there quickly. Against clean shots he is reliable.

The rebound control is the weakness and it always has been. Behind a club that gives up second chances he has never had a season that held up, and 139 games at .8985 is a long enough sample to stop calling it circumstance.

The Mental Game

Twenty-four losses in thirty-seven games. He is 28 and has now spent three seasons on clubs that could not protect him, and the numbers have not moved in either direction across them.

There is nothing in the record to suggest the season broke him and nothing to suggest it taught him anything either.

The Intangibles

A fourth-round pick, 109th overall in 2014, out of Helsinki, with 139 games and 49 wins across five seasons and three clubs.

He is 28 and joining his fourth organisation as the second or third goaltender. On a club that scores 304 goals he will win some games he has no business winning.

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 weakness and it always has been.”

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

    “He is 6-2 and 217 and heavy for a goaltender, and he plays a square, positional game that depends on being in the right place rather than on getting there quickly.”