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.
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32

Kevin Lankinen

Vancouver Canucks Goaltender

Undrafted, and a .9050 across 112 games and three organisations.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21CHI37171451093.0121204.909
2021-22CHI3281561063.500973.891
2022-23NSH19981492.750583.916
2023-24NSH241160562.821610.908
2024-25 so far——————————
Career—1124543123203.0733370.905

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

24 games with Nashville, 11-6-0 with a .9082 and a 2.82, 1 shutout, facing 610 shots.

Eleven wins against six losses in 24 games behind a club that finished with 99 points. The .9082 is the second-best figure of his four seasons and the sample is a quarter of a year.

The Physical Game

He is 6-2 and 190.

He is quick rather than large and plays out at the top of the paint, challenging the shooter and relying on the push across to recover. At 6-2 that is the right trade and it is also why the low shot through traffic is the one that beats him.

The Mental Game

A career .9050 across 112 games with 3 shutouts.

An .9095, an .8911, a .9160 and a .9082 across four seasons is a goaltender who has never had two alike. He has played thirty-seven games in a season exactly once and has not been anybody’s first choice since.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, four seasons, and Vancouver will be his third organisation.

Forty-five career wins against 43 losses in 112 games from a man nobody drafted. He is 29, he came out of Finland at 25, and he is arriving to play behind a goaltender who has played more than fifty games twice in seven seasons.

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.

  • plays-aggressivea strength· meets the shooter at the top of the crease

    “He is quick rather than large and plays out at the top of the paint, challenging the shooter and relying on the push across to recover.”

  • tracks-traffiche lacks it· finds it through a screen

    “At 6-2 that is the right trade and it is also why the low shot through traffic is the one that beats him.”