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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45

Michael Hutchinson

Detroit Red Wings Goaltender

Ten seasons, 153 games, and never once the man the club wanted.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2013-14WPG321051.64088.943
2014-15WPG3821105852.382986.914
2015-16WPG309153752.840805.907
2016-17WPG289123672.921690.903
2017-18WPG321073.26075.907
2018-19FLA/TOR9342273.271239.887
2019-20TOR/COL16591493.471439.888
2020-21TOR8421172.421211.919
2021-22TOR201064.57042.857
2022-23CBJ16263544.290432.875
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1535761183922.9364007.902

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

16 games for Columbus, 2-6-3, .8750, 4.29, on 432 shots.

Columbus dressed three goaltenders and his was the worst figure of the three, behind Merzlikins’ .8763 and Tarasov’s .8920. The club conceded 330 goals and finished 31st in expected goals against, so no part of that number is his alone.

Ten seasons, 153 games. He has played 30 or more in a season twice, both of them in Winnipeg a decade ago.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 201. The technique is conventional and unremarkable: he is square, he plays a moderate depth, and he does not create anything he is not given.

What a career backup has to do is not lose games the club was going to win, and the record on that is mixed: .9194 in eight Toronto games one year, .8571 in two the next, .8750 in sixteen last season. The variance is enormous because the samples are tiny.

Rebound control is the weakest part, and behind clubs that give up traffic it is the thing that shows.

The Intangibles

77th overall in 2008 to Boston, and a career of American-league starts punctuated by emergency NHL call-ups across five organisations.

He is 33, has 153 NHL games in ten years, and has been claimed, waived and re-signed more times than this book can usefully count. Detroit signed him as the third goaltender.

That is a real job and he has been very good at holding it.

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.

  • rebound-controlhe lacks it· where the second chance ends up

    “Rebound control is the weakest part, and behind clubs that give up traffic it is the thing that shows.”