Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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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31

Laurent Brossoit

Winnipeg Jets Goaltender

A .9274 in eleven games, and a career .9075 in a hundred and seventeen.

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
2022-23VGK11703232.170317.927
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1174941112892.7833126.907

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

7-0-3 in 11 games, .9274, 2.17, no shutouts on 317 shots for Vegas.

Seven wins and no regulation losses in eleven games, and three hundred and seventeen shots is a quarter of what this book’s thousand-shot pool requires. The .9274 is a very good number attached to a sample that cannot support it.

Those 35 goaltenders stopped .9067 between them. On 317 shots the distance from that rate to his is about seven goals, which is the whole of the season.

Nine seasons, 117 games, a career .9075 on 3,126 shots — and that figure is the one to plan around.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 203 pounds, and the game is angle and depth rather than reflex: he plays out at the top of his crease and takes the shot away before it is released.

He plays aggressive and high, and against a clean shot from distance it works. The trade is the one every goaltender who does it makes: the pass across the crease leaves him a long way from the far post.

The rebound control is adequate.

The puck-handling is genuinely good and it is a real part of what a backup offers a defence that is being outshot.

The seasons read .9608 on 51 shots, .8732 on 142, .9281 on 153, .8834 on 343, .9248 on 652, .8945 on 512, .9185 on 368, .8946 on 588 and .9274 on 317. Nine seasons and not one of them above six hundred and sixty shots, alternating between very good and poor without a pattern anybody can name.

A career .9075 across 3,126 shots is the honest estimate and it is a backup’s figure.

The Intangibles

A hundred and sixty-fourth overall in 2011, the sixth round, nine seasons, 117 games across Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vegas.

49 wins, three shutouts, and a career .9075.

He is thirty, returning to a club he played three seasons for, to back up a Vezina winner.

Twenty starts behind Winnipeg’s defence should produce a good record and it will tell nobody anything, which is the standing condition of the job. What the file actually contains is nine seasons of small samples and a career figure a shade below the league’s.

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.

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

    “He plays aggressive and high, and against a clean shot from distance it works.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is genuinely good and it is a real part of what a backup offers a defence that is being outshot.”