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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32

Kevin Lankinen

Nashville Predators Goaltender

Undrafted, a .9160 in nineteen games, and the best backup season of a three-year career.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21CHI37171451093.0121204.909
2021-22CHI3281561063.500973.891
2022-23NSH19981492.750583.916
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—883437122643.1322760.904

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

9-8-1 in 19 games, .9160, 2.75, no shutouts on 583 shots.

A .9160 across nineteen games is the best figure of his career and the first time he has been above .9100 in it.

The three seasons read .9095, .8911 and .9160. Nineteen games is a third of a season and the number carries all the uncertainty that implies.

Nashville’s goaltending value finished third in the league. Saros played sixty-four of the eighty-two and faced 2,099 shots; this was the rest of it, and it did not cost the club anything.

Three seasons, 88 games.

The Finesse Game

6-2 and 190, and a compact, technical style built on staying square and letting the shot arrive.

He is at his best when the club in front of him keeps the play to the outside, which Nashville does not — the twenty-seventh-ranked expected-goals-against rate at even strength means a great deal of what he faced came from the middle.

Thirty and a half shots a game across nineteen appearances is a real workload for a backup, and .9160 against it is a good season.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Finland, signed by Chicago at twenty-three, and thirty-seven games as a rookie behind a bad club.

He is twenty-eight and has never been a first choice for a full season. The record says a competent backup, and a competent backup behind a goaltender who plays sixty-four games is not asked for much.

What Nashville needs from this position is twenty starts at .910. He has now done that once.

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.

  • undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached

    “**Undrafted**, out of Finland, signed by Chicago at twenty-three, and thirty-seven games as a rookie behind a bad club.”