This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Linus Ullmark
Boston Bruins Goaltender
A .9167 and 26 wins in 41 games, behind the best chance-suppressing defence in the league — which is the whole difficulty in reading it.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | BUF | 20 | 8 | 10 | 2 | 49 | 2.60 | 0 | 565 | .913 |
| 2016-17 | BUF | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 3.06 | 0 | 36 | .917 |
| 2017-18 | BUF | 5 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 8 | 2.00 | 0 | 123 | .935 |
| 2018-19 | BUF | 37 | 15 | 14 | 5 | 109 | 3.11 | 2 | 1146 | .905 |
| 2019-20 | BUF | 34 | 17 | 14 | 3 | 91 | 2.69 | 1 | 1066 | .915 |
| 2020-21 | BUF | 20 | 9 | 6 | 3 | 49 | 2.63 | 0 | 591 | .917 |
| 2021-22 | BOS | 41 | 26 | 10 | 2 | 95 | 2.45 | 1 | 1140 | .917 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 158 | 76 | 57 | 15 | 404 | 2.69 | 4 | 4667 | .913 |
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
41 games, 26-10-2, a .9167 save percentage and a 2.45 goals-against average, with 1 shutout on 1,140 shots faced.
Twenty-eight shots a night. Boston allowed 2.126 expected goals against per 60 at even strength — the lowest rate in the league — and took 56.2 per cent of the chances at five-on-five, 2nd. This is the most forgiving crease in hockey.
And the club’s goaltending still finished 11.4 goals worse than the chances it faced, 22nd in the league. Two goaltenders at .9167 and .9136 look perfectly respectable until they are measured against what they were actually facing, and against that, Boston’s crease was below average.
At five-on-five the club conceded 144 goals against an expectation of 132.6. That gap is the single clearest weakness on a team that finished 4th in goals against.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 223, and he handles the puck better than most goaltenders his size — a genuine third defenceman on a retrieval, which matters more behind a club that wants to leave its own end quickly.
He is a big, upright, positional goaltender who covers the net by being in front of it rather than by reaching. The lateral recovery is the ordinary part, and on 28 shots a night it is not tested often.
The Mental Game
Twenty-six wins in 41 games in a first season in Boston, after six in Buffalo — where his career line was built behind a club that conceded chances at nearly twice the rate.
There is a version of this where the .9167 is simply the same goaltender in better circumstances, and the measured record supports it: his career save percentage across 158 games is .9134, which is close enough to last season’s to suggest the environment did the moving.
The Intangibles
One hundred and sixty-third overall in 2012 by Buffalo, six seasons there, and a four-year contract in Boston signed at twenty-eight.
He is 29, sharing a net with a twenty-three-year-old who posted almost the same save percentage on almost the same number of games. Boston is paying starter money for a tandem, and the question the 11.4 asks is whether either half of it is good enough for a club whose defence is this good.
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.
“6-4 and 223, and he handles the puck better than most goaltenders his size”