This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Kevin Lankinen
Nashville Predators Goaltender
The 51st-best save percentage of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games, arriving as the backup.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | CHI | 37 | 17 | 14 | 5 | 109 | 3.01 | 2 | 1204 | .909 |
| 2021-22 | CHI | 32 | 8 | 15 | 6 | 106 | 3.50 | 0 | 973 | .891 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 69 | 25 | 29 | 11 | 215 | 3.23 | 2 | 2177 | .901 |
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
32 games for Chicago, 8-15-6, a .8911 save percentage and a 3.50 goals-against, no shutouts on 973 shots. That is 51st of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games — third from the bottom, ahead of only Thomas Greiss and Philipp Grubauer.
Undrafted out of Finland, and sixty-nine NHL games out of it by 27.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 190 pounds, which is ordinary for the position and three inches taller than the man he is backing up.
The two-season record is short and it points down. .9095 across 1,204 shots in 2020-21 and .8911 across 973 in 2021-22. Career .9012 on 2,177 shots.
A hundred and eighty-four points of save percentage lost in one year is a large move on a small sample, and 2,177 career shots is not enough to say which of the two figures is the man.
The Mental Game
The club in front of him was genuinely poor. Chicago finished 29th in attempt share, 29th in chances and 32nd in expected goals per 60 at even strength — the worst chance-creation rate in the league.
Its goaltending rated 27th at minus-24.9 goals saved below expectation, so the crease was not blameless either, and Marc-Andre Fleury shared it at .9082 before being traded.
A .8911 behind the 32nd-ranked offence and the 16th-ranked defensive rate is not a clean read on anybody, and this report will not pretend the number is entirely his or entirely the club’s.
The Intangibles
He is 27 and arrives to play perhaps fifteen games behind a goaltender who played sixty-seven. Nashville’s problem is not that its starter needs replacing; it is that its starter faced more shots last season than every goaltender in the league except Connor Hellebuyck.
Nothing here measures technique, temperament or how he handles a bad night. What it measures is a save percentage third from the bottom of the league, behind the worst chance-creation rate in it, and a career of 2,177 shots that is too short to settle the question either way.
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.
“Undrafted out of Finland, and sixty-nine NHL games out of it by 27.”