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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39

Mackenzie Blackwood

New Jersey Devils Goaltender

A save percentage that has fallen in each of four NHL seasons — .9178, .9146, .9019, .8919.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19NJD2310100552.612669.918
2019-20NJD47221481242.7731452.915
2020-21NJD35141741063.0411081.902
2021-22NJD259104793.392731.892
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—1305551163642.9483933.907

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

25 games, 9-10-4, a .8919 save percentage and a 3.39 goals-against, two shutouts on 731 shots. That is 49th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games — fifth from the bottom.

Forty-second overall in 2015, four seasons, 130 games, at 25.

The Physical Game

The career shape is the report and it is a straight line. .9178, .9146, .9019, .8919. Every season worse than the one before it, across 3,933 shots. Career .9074.

Two hundred and fifty-nine points of save percentage lost in four years, monotonically. That is not a bad season inside a good record; it is a trend with no interruption in it, and it is the second such case in this batch after Cal Petersen in Los Angeles.

The Mental Game

The club in front of him was not the problem. New Jersey finished 14th in attempt share, 12th in chances and 7th in expected goals per 60 at even strength — a genuinely competent process club. It finished 28th anyway, and the reason is in the crease.

New Jersey rated 32nd in the league in goaltending at minus-43.3 goals saved below expectation. Thirty goals worse than the 31st-place club. Its five-on-five goals for came in at 182 against an expectation of 182.3 — exact — and its goals against came in at 216 against an expectation of 172.7.

One number ruined this season and it was not the skaters’.

The Intangibles

He is 25 and was the club’s own second-round pick, and the crease has now been handed to Vitek Vanecek.

Nothing here measures how he moves or what he does with a rebound. What it measures is four consecutive years of decline in the only column that matters, and the club’s response, which was to acquire somebody else.