This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Pheonix Copley
Los Angeles Kings Goaltender
Twenty-four wins in thirty-seven appearances on a .9029, which is the clearest thing this book can show you about what a goaltender's record measures.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | STL | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2.46 | 0 | 6 | .833 |
| 2016-17 | STL | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 5.09 | 0 | 29 | .828 |
| 2018-19 | WSH | 27 | 16 | 7 | 3 | 74 | 2.90 | 1 | 776 | .905 |
| 2021-22 | WSH | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 3.11 | 0 | 41 | .878 |
| 2022-23 | LAK | 37 | 24 | 6 | 3 | 92 | 2.64 | 1 | 947 | .903 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 68 | 40 | 15 | 6 | 177 | 2.80 | 2 | 1799 | .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
24-6-3 in 37 games, .9029, 2.64, one shutout on 947 shots.
Read those two numbers together, because they do not belong in the same sentence anywhere else in this book. Twenty-four wins against six regulation losses, on a save percentage below the league average for a man who plays thirty games.
The explanation is the club. Los Angeles allowed the second-fewest expected goals per sixty at even strength in the entire league, and a goaltender playing behind that wins games he has not earned. The club’s goaltending value still finished twenty-third, which is the model saying the same thing from the other direction.
A thirty-one-year-old on his first extended run of NHL work.
Five seasons, 68 games.
The Finesse Game
6-4 and 205, and a blocking style built on size and on staying square.
He is deep in his crease and lets the puck come to him. Against the volume Los Angeles allows — the second-lowest expected-goals-against rate per sixty in the league — that works, because most of what arrives is from outside and taken cleanly.
What the record cannot tell you is how he handles the games where that structure breaks down, because on 947 shots in a season he faced very few of them. Sixty-eight career games is not enough to answer it either.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, out of North Pole, Alaska, by way of Michigan Tech, and nine professional seasons to sixty-eight NHL games.
He was thirty-one before he played thirty games in a season. Nothing about that path suggests a starter, and nothing about the .9029 contradicts it.
This book records the 24-6-3 as an artefact of the club in front of him and not as a description of the goaltender, and it is the single cleanest example of that distinction in the edition.
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.
“**Undrafted**, out of North Pole, Alaska, by way of Michigan Tech, and nine professional seasons to sixty-eight NHL games.”
“He is deep in his crease and lets the puck come to him.”