Armchair Hockey Scout

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2024-25 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 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

30

Samuel Ersson

Philadelphia Flyers Goaltender

Fifty-one games and an .8904, behind the seventh-best chance suppression in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2022-23PHI12630333.071327.899
2023-24PHI51231971322.8241204.890
2024-25 so far——————————
Career—63292271652.8751531.892

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

51 games, 23-19-7, an .8904 and a 2.82, 1,204 shots faced and 4 shutouts.

Philadelphia’s crease came in 29.3 goals worse than the chances it faced, thirty-first in the league, behind a club that allowed the seventh-fewest expected goals per 60 at even strength. His .8904 was tied for the eighth-lowest save percentage of any goaltender who played twenty-five games, and of the eight at or below him only Joonas Korpisalo played more of them.

The Physical Game

He is 6-3 and 194 and plays a controlled, positional game with very little athleticism in it.

Four shutouts in 51 games and five in a 63-game career. He is square and quiet and does not improvise; when the first shot is stopped the puck tends to stay in front of him rather than going to a corner, and the second chance is where the season went. He handles the puck without doing anything with it.

The Mental Game

A career .8922 across 63 games, and an .8991 in 12 games the season before this one.

Twenty-three wins in a first season as a starter, at 24, on a club that finished twentieth. There is no earlier body of NHL work to set this against — 63 games is the whole of it — and an .8922 across them is not yet evidence of anything except that it has not gone well.

The Intangibles

143rd overall in 2018, two seasons and 63 games at 24, both of them in Philadelphia.

A fifth-round pick handed fifty-one games at 24 because there was nobody else. Philadelphia took more than half the chances at five-on-five and finished twentieth, and this is the position that explains 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

    “He is square and quiet and does not improvise; when the first shot is stopped the puck tends to stay in front of him rather than going to a corner, and the second chance is where the season went.”

  • puck-handlinghe lacks it· starts the breakout himself

    “He handles the puck without doing anything with it.”