Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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31

Laurent Brossoit

Vegas Golden Knights Goaltender

Two seasons of six hundred shots three hundredths apart, and a career .9053 across 2,809.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2014-15EDM101022.01051.961
2015-16EDM5041183.610142.873
2016-17EDM8410111.990153.928
2017-18EDM14371403.240343.883
2018-19WPG211362492.521652.925
2019-20WPG19671543.280512.894
2020-21WPG14660302.421368.918
2021-22VGK241093622.901588.895
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—106424182662.8432809.905

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

24 games, 10-9-3, a .8946 save percentage and a 2.90 goals-against, one shutout on 588 shots. Hundred-and-sixty-fourth overall in 2011 by Calgary — the sixth round — eight seasons, 106 games.

Twenty-four games is one short of the twenty-five this book requires before it will place a goaltender in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 203 pounds, and 29 years old.

Eight seasons and 2,809 career shots at .9053. The years read .9608 across fifty-one shots, .8732 across 142, .9281 across 153, .8834 across 343, .9248 across 652, .8945 across 512, .9185 across 368 and .8946 across 588.

Read that list twice. It alternates. His two largest samples are 652 shots at .9248 and 588 at .8946 — thirty hundredths of a point apart, which is the difference between a starter and a man out of the league.

Eight seasons and 106 games is thirteen a year. Nothing in the record is a sample and nothing in it is a trend.

The Mental Game

Vegas rated 11th in the league in goaltending at plus-4.6 goals saved above expectation, tied with St Louis, and the crease also carried Robin Lehner for forty-four games and Logan Thompson for nineteen.

The skaters in front were the 8th-best possession club in the league and 4th in expected goals for per sixty at even strength. That is not an alibi; it is the opposite. A .8946 behind the fourth-best even-strength attack in hockey is a bad season with no excuse attached to it.

The one mitigation the numbers offer is the penalty kill: Vegas conceded 7.366 expected goals against per 60 short-handed, 29th in the league, though it spent less time there than all but one club.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures rebound control, lateral recovery or how he reads a screen.

What it measures is a 29-year-old with 2,809 career shots, a .9053 across all of them, and no two consecutive seasons that agree with each other.

He is under contract as the man who takes the games the starter does not, and the record says the range of outcomes for those games runs from .8946 to .9248 with nothing in between to explain which. That is the definition of a backup, and it is not a criticism of one.