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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39

Mackenzie Blackwood

San Jose Sharks Goaltender

Six-foot-four, a .9146 season at twenty-three, and three seasons of decline since.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19NJD2310100552.612669.918
2019-20NJD47221481242.7731452.915
2020-21NJD35141741063.0411081.902
2021-22NJD259104793.392731.892
2022-23NJD221062603.200563.893
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1526557184242.9784496.906

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

10-6-2 in 22 games, .8934, 3.20, no shutouts on 563 shots for New Jersey.

25.6 shots a night behind a club that finished seventh in the league in five-on-five chances allowed per sixty and second in chance share — the softest workload of his career — and an .8934 out of it.

That is the number that matters most in this file. The two seasons in which he faced the fewest dangerous shots are the two in which he has posted his worst save percentages.

Five seasons, 152 games, a career .9057 and a 2.97 goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-4 and 225 pounds, which is the largest goaltender in this chapter and the first thing anybody says about him.

He fills the net from a fairly upright stance and takes away the top of it without moving, and the glove is genuinely good — the high shot is not where he is beaten.

Where he is beaten is across. The lateral recovery is slow for a goaltender of his age, and the second shot from the far post is the recurring goal against him. That is the ordinary cost of size and it has not improved in five seasons.

The puck-handling is a liability. He is careful with it rather than useful, and a club that wants its goaltender to start the breakout will not get it here.

The seasons read .9178 on 669 shots, .9146 on 1,452, .9019 on 1,081, .8919 on 731 and .8934 on 563. That is a straight line down from twenty-two to twenty-five, with no recovery at twenty-six, on a club that improved sharply around him: New Jersey’s goaltending as a whole was eleventh in the league last season while his own share of it was this.

The honest reading is a goaltender whose measured record has got worse every year since his second season and who is now twenty-six.

The Intangibles

Forty-second overall in 2015, the second round, five seasons, 152 games, all of them in New Jersey.

The 47-game season in 2019-20 at a .9146 is the one that made him a prospect worth trading for, and nothing since has approached it.

He is twenty-six, which is young for a goaltender and old enough that four seasons of decline is a pattern rather than a wobble. San Jose has acquired him to compete for a starting job on a club that will make either of these two goaltenders look bad.

That is the useful thing to say about this crease. Neither man is going to be measurable here. A club whose goaltending was forty-two goals below expectation and whose best defenceman has been traded is not a place where a save percentage means anything, and both files should be read again in two years somewhere else.

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
  • 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-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The lateral recovery is slow for a goaltender of his age, and the second shot from the far post is the recurring goal against him.”

  • puck-handlinghe lacks it· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is a liability.”

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “He fills the net from a fairly upright stance and takes away the top of it without moving, and the glove is genuinely good — the high shot is not where he is beaten.”