Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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1

Lukas Dostal

Anaheim Ducks Goaltender

A .9028 in 54 games behind the worst chance-suppression in the league, and 27.5 goals saved above expectation.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2021-22ANA4120102.980108.907
2022-23ANA194103673.780679.901
2023-24ANA44142331293.3311310.901
2024-25ANA54232371583.1011625.903
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—1214258133643.2923722.902

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

23-23-7 in 54 games, .9028 with a 3.10 average and 1 shutout on 1,625 shots.

A .9028 and a 3.10 look like a bad season and they are the opposite. Anaheim conceded chances at 3.00 expected goals against per 60, dead last in the league, and the club’s goaltending came in 27.5 goals better than what it faced, 2nd in hockey. Almost all of that is his.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 190, which is small by modern standards, and the game is athletic rather than structural. He covers the net by moving to the puck rather than by occupying space, and the lateral quickness is genuinely high-end.

The rebound control is decent and could be better; on a club facing this many second chances it matters more than usual. What stands out is that he does not get progressively worse as a game gets worse, which for a goaltender facing 33 shots a night is the whole job.

The Mental Game

Two seasons of facing more danger than any goaltender in the league and no visible sign of it wearing on him. He has been pulled, he has lost by four, and the next start has looked the same.

That is the specific thing that separates a young goaltender who survives a rebuild from one who is ruined by it, and there is now a real sample of it.

The Intangibles

A third-round pick who spent three years behind an established starter and took the job the moment it was available, at 24, on the worst defensive team in hockey.

He is the most valuable asset in this organisation after Leo Carlsson, and the club has now traded away the goaltender he replaced. What nobody knows is what a .9028 becomes in front of a competent defence — the honest guess is something considerably better than the number looks.

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
  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
  • 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.

  • lateral-recoverya strength· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “He covers the net by moving to the puck rather than by occupying space, and the lateral quickness is genuinely high-end.”

  • plays-deephe lacks it· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He covers the net by moving to the puck rather than by occupying space”

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is decent and could be better”