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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31

Martin Jones

Toronto Maple Leafs Goaltender

Twenty-seven wins on an .8856, which is the third-worst save percentage in this book.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2013-14LAK191260331.814500.934
2014-15LAK15452292.243307.905
2015-16SJS65372341432.2761734.917
2016-17SJS65352361522.4021725.912
2017-18SJS60302261452.5541699.915
2018-19SJS62361951762.9431699.896
2019-20SJS41172121183.0021139.896
2020-21SJS34151341023.281980.896
2021-22PHI35121831143.4201141.900
2022-23SEA48271331312.9931145.886
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—4442251633511432.712812069.905

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

27-13-3 in 48 games, .8856, 2.99, three shutouts on 1,145 shots for Seattle.

That is the third-worst save percentage of the 35 goaltenders in this book who faced a thousand shots, ahead of only Jonathan Quick and Kaapo Kahkonen.

Those 35 stopped .9067 between them. On 1,145 shots, the distance from that rate to his is about twenty-four goals.

And he won twenty-seven games doing it, because Seattle finished sixth in the league in goals for and third in expected goals against per sixty. The wins are the club’s; the save percentage is his.

Seattle’s goaltending as a whole was worth minus-6.5 goals against the chances it faced, twenty-first in the league, across the 48 games he played and the 34 he did not.

Ten seasons, 444 games, a career .9053.

The Finesse Game

6-5 and 203 pounds, with only five goaltenders in this book taller, and thin with it, which is the shape of a man who covers the net by standing up in it rather than by moving.

He plays deep in his crease and square to the puck, and against a straight shot from distance that is still perfectly effective.

The lateral game is where the seasons have gone. He is slow to recover across the crease, and the goal that beats him is the one after the pass, which is most of the goals scored in this league now.

The puck-handling is a genuine asset and always has been: he leaves it in the right place behind the net and saves his defencemen a hit.

The seasons read .9340, .9055, .9175, .9119, .9147, .8964, .8964, .8959, .9001 and .8856. Five consecutive seasons below .9010, on 6,104 shots. That is not a slump. That is what he is now.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, ten seasons, 444 games across Los Angeles, San Jose, Philadelphia and Seattle.

225 wins, 163 regulation losses, 28 shutouts, and a career .9053 on 12,069 shots. Two Stanley Cup finals, one as a backup in Los Angeles and one as the starter in San Jose in 2016.

An undrafted goaltender with two hundred and twenty-five NHL wins is a career worth stating plainly, whatever the last five seasons look like.

He is thirty-three, signed as a backup on a club that finished fourth in the league.

The role is the whole of the file. Twenty starts behind this team should produce a respectable record, and the moment it becomes forty the five-season trend above becomes the club’s problem rather than his.

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 in his crease and square to the puck, and against a straight shot from distance that is still perfectly effective.”

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

    “He is slow to recover across the crease, and the goal that beats him is the one after the pass, which is most of the goals scored in this league now.”

  • puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself

    “The puck-handling is a genuine asset and always has been: he leaves it in the right place behind the net and saves his defencemen a hit.”

  • undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached

    “An undrafted goaltender with two hundred and twenty-five NHL wins is a career worth stating plainly, whatever the last five seasons look like.”