Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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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70

Karel Vejmelka

Arizona Coyotes Goaltender

Fifty-two games and an .8981 behind the worst possession club in hockey, in a first North American season at twenty-five.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2021-22ARI52133231703.6811669.898
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—52133231703.6811669.898

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

52 games, 13-32-3, an .8981 save percentage and a 3.68 goals-against average, with 1 shutout on 1,669 shots faced — 32 a night.

A rookie season at twenty-five, after a career in the Czech league. Arizona claimed the job by default: five other goaltenders dressed for this club last season and none of them played more than 26 games.

Arizona’s goaltending came in 31.9 goals worse than the chances it faced, 30th in the league. That is the third-worst crease in hockey behind the worst defence in hockey — the club allowed 2.939 expected goals against per 60 at even strength, 30th, and took 42.8 per cent of the chances at five-on-five, dead last.

Both numbers are true at once and the honest reading is that they cannot be separated. An .8981 on 1,669 shots is bad by any measure. It was also faced from in front of the 32nd-ranked possession club in the league.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 221, and he covers the net by filling it rather than by moving across it. He is a positional goaltender without exceptional quickness, which is a workable method behind structure and a difficult one behind none.

The rebound control is where a season like this shows. On a club that concedes 32 shots a night with the puck living in its own end, a second chance is not a scramble, it is the norm, and there was no recovery available from most of them.

The Mental Game

Thirteen wins in 52 starts. He lost 32 games in a season in which his club won 25 in total, and he was, for most of the year, the only reason any of them were close.

What can be said is that he kept taking the net. Five goaltenders played here and the one who played four times as much as anybody else was the twenty-five-year-old rookie, which is a statement about the club and about him in roughly equal measure.

The Intangibles

One hundred and forty-fifth overall in 2015 by Nashville, never signed there, a long apprenticeship in Brno, and a professional debut in North America at twenty-five.

He is 26, and he has the job because there is nobody to take it from him. A save percentage under .900 in a first NHL season proves nothing either way, and 2022-23 — behind the same defence, in a 5,000-seat college rink — will not prove very much more.

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.

  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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.

  • tracks-trafficpresent and ordinary· finds it through a screen

    “6-4 and 221, and he covers the net by filling it rather than by moving across it”