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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40

Mads Sogaard

Ottawa Senators Goaltender

Six-foot-seven — the tallest goaltender in this book — and an .8893 in nineteen games.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2021-22OTT211063.07054.889
2022-23OTT19863583.320524.889
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—21973643.300578.889

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

8-6-3 in 19 games, .8893, 3.32, no shutouts on 524 shots.

27.6 shots a night, and an .8893 that would have been the worst figure in the league at any volume.

Nineteen games is a small sample and this book will say the obvious about it: a save percentage moves twenty points on four pucks at that size. What it will also say is that Ottawa’s three goaltenders combined for a save percentage under .900 and the club’s goaltending was worth minus-18.6 goals, twenty-seventh in the league, and none of that is a sampling artefact.

Two seasons, 21 NHL games, a 3.30 career goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-7 and 231 pounds — the tallest goaltender in this book by an inch, and everything in the file follows from it.

Standing still, he covers more of the net than anybody at the position. He plays deep and lets the size work, which against a clean shot from distance is close to unbeatable and is the reason a twenty-two-year-old was in the league at all.

Where the height costs him is low and lateral. Getting down and across is slower for a 6-7 goaltender than for anybody else, and the goals came from the second and third chance and from the far post.

The puck-handling is poor. At his size the reach should be an asset behind the net and it is not one yet.

The Intangibles

Thirty-seventh overall in 2019, the second round, out of Aalborg, and 21 NHL games across two seasons at twenty-two.

An .8893 in nineteen appearances on a club whose crease was the worst part of it.

He is twenty-two, which is very young for the position — most goaltenders of his build are three years from settled — and the file’s honest content is that the raw material is unusual and the results so far are bad. Both of those are normal at his age and only one of them will still be true at twenty-six.

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.

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He plays deep and lets the size work, which against a clean shot from distance is close to unbeatable and is the reason a twenty-two-year-old was in the league at all.”

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

    “Getting down and across is slower for a 6-7 goaltender than for anybody else, and the goals came from the second and third chance and from the far post.”

  • puck-handlinghe lacks it· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is poor. At his size the reach should be an asset behind the net and it is not one yet.”