Magnus Hellberg
Pittsburgh Penguins Goaltender
Six-foot-six, thirty-one years old, and eighteen NHL games after ten years of waiting for them.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | NSH | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4.92 | 0 | 4 | .750 |
| 2015-16 | NYR | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 6.00 | 0 | 6 | .667 |
| 2016-17 | NYR | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1.53 | 0 | 28 | .929 |
| 2021-22 | DET | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3.00 | 0 | 23 | .870 |
| 2022-23 | OTT/DET | 18 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 50 | 3.20 | 0 | 447 | .888 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 23 | 7 | 8 | 1 | 58 | 3.14 | 0 | 508 | .886 |
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
5-8-1 in 18 games, .8881, 3.20, no shutouts on 447 shots between Ottawa and Detroit.
It was, at thirty-one, the first season of his career in which he played more than two NHL games. The four before it, spread across ten years, totalled five.
24.8 shots a night and a .8881, which is a poor number and a small one: 447 shots is about a month of a starter’s work.
The Finesse Game
6-6 and 206 pounds, which is as large as goaltenders come and is the entire reason the career has lasted.
He fills the net standing up and takes away the high shot without moving, and the whole question with a goaltender this size is what happens when the puck goes across. The recovery is slow and the second save is where the record goes.
The rebound control is ordinary and the puck-handling is a liability rather than an asset.
His five NHL seasons read .7500 on four shots, .6667 on six, .9286 on 28, .8696 on 23 and .8881 on 447. There is no signal in any of that except the last one, and the last one is below average.
What is genuinely unusual is the shape of the career around them: drafted in 2011, five NHL games in the ten years that followed, and then eighteen in one season at thirty-one. Where he was playing in between is not something this book measures.
The Intangibles
Thirty-eighth overall in 2011, the second round, and 23 NHL games across five seasons that span ten years.
He is thirty-two and the third goaltender on a club whose starter has never played sixty games. That is not nothing: the odds of a third goaltender dressing here are higher than they would be almost anywhere else.
The file is thin because the career has been. What can be said is that he is enormous, that he has kept himself employable for a decade, and that eighteen games at .8881 is the whole of the NHL evidence.
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.
- 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.
“The recovery is slow and the second save is where the record goes.”
“The rebound control is ordinary and the puck-handling is a liability rather than an asset.”