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

Philipp Grubauer

Seattle Kraken Goaltender

A .9118 across 308 games, and .8891 and .8946 in the two since he arrived in Seattle.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2012-13WSH201053.57059.915
2013-14WSH17655352.380469.925
2014-15WSH110021.85025.920
2015-16WSH22891432.320523.918
2016-17WSH241362432.043585.926
2017-18WSH3515103732.353953.923
2018-19COL371895892.6431071.917
2019-20COL3618124902.6321067.916
2020-21COL403091771.957993.922
2021-22SEA55183151643.1621479.889
2022-23SEA3917144982.850930.895
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—308144106307192.55208154.912

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

17-14-4 in 39 games, .8946, 2.85, no shutouts on 930 shots.

23.8 shots a night behind the third-stingiest chance profile in the league — the softest workload of any starter in this chapter and one of the softest anywhere.

Seattle’s goaltending was worth minus-6.5 goals against the chances it faced, twenty-first in the league. On a club that finished twelfth with 100 points and led the league in finishing by a distance, that is the one part of the record that went the wrong way.

Eleven seasons, 308 games, a career .9118 and a 2.55 goals-against average.

The Finesse Game

6-1 and 188 pounds, which is small for a modern goaltender and has never stopped him being good.

He plays a compact, technically quiet game from a fairly deep position, and for eight seasons in Washington and Colorado it produced save percentages between .9153 and .9265 with almost no variance.

Then the two seasons in Seattle: .8891 on 1,479 shots and .8946 on 930. That is 2,409 shots at a level two hundred points below everything before it, which is a large enough sample that the ordinary explanations run out.

The rebound control is the visible weakness and it is not new. What is new is how often the second chance is arriving, and this book cannot tell whether that is the crease or the club: the goaltending measure says minus-6.5, which is a bad season and not a catastrophic one, so the shot quality he faces is doing part of the work in the raw number.

The honest statement is that a genuinely good goaltender for eight years has been a below-average one for two, on 2,400 shots, and nothing in the data available here separates the man from the move.

The Intangibles

A hundred and twelfth overall in 2010, the fourth round, eleven seasons, 308 games across Washington, Colorado and Seattle.

The 40-game season in Colorado in 2020-21 at .9225 with seven shutouts is the peak, and it is the season that got him the contract he is now playing out.

He is thirty-one, which for a goaltender is the age at which two bad years stop being read as bad luck.

What the club has is a starter whose career record says .9118 and whose last two seasons say .8912, and no way to know which is the true number until a third one lands.

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 a compact, technically quiet game from a fairly deep position, and for eight seasons in Washington and Colorado it produced save percentages between .9153 and .9265 with almost no variance.”

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

    “The rebound control is the visible weakness and it is not new.”