Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2022-23 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 2022-23 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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39

Pavel Francouz

Colorado Avalanche Goaltender

A career .9207 across 57 games, and a Stanley Cup won without him playing a minute of the final.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19COL202021.96035.943
2019-20COL342174772.411996.923
2021-22COL211551512.552608.916
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—57361451302.4631639.921

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

21 games, 15-5-1, a .9161 save percentage and a 2.55 goals-against average, with 2 shutouts on 608 shots faced. Colorado won the Stanley Cup.

Fifteen wins in 21 games. Colorado’s goaltending as a club finished exactly level with the chances it faced, 16th in the league, and his .9161 was the better of the two figures that produced it.

Twenty-one games is the most he has played since 2019-20; he did not play an NHL game at all in 2020-21.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 179, which is small, and he plays a controlled, positional game rather than an athletic one — square, deep enough to be patient, and reliant on reading the play early because he cannot cover the net by filling it.

Three seasons and 57 NHL games, a career .9207. That is a genuinely excellent number and 1,639 shots is a real if modest sample of it.

The Mental Game

He was 28 before he played an NHL game, after eight seasons in the Czech league and the KHL, and he has been a backup for all three of the seasons since.

Fifteen wins in 21 games on a 119-point team is exactly what a good backup does there, and the career .9207 says he may be more than that. Nobody has found out.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, and 57 NHL games at 32 with a Stanley Cup.

Darcy Kuemper has gone to Washington and Alexandar Georgiev has arrived with a career .9085 across 129 games. Francouz has a career .9207 across 57. On the measured record the backup is the better goaltender and the club has made the other man the starter, which is a reasonable decision about workload and an odd one about save percentage.

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

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.

  • undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached

    “Undrafted, and 57 NHL games at 32 with a Stanley Cup.”