Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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30

Samuel Ersson

Philadelphia Flyers Goaltender

A .883 across 47 games, on a club whose goaltending finished 42 goals worse than the chances faced.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2022-23PHI12630333.071327.899
2023-24PHI51231971322.8241204.890
2024-25PHI47221751363.1421162.883
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—1105139123012.9872693.888

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

22-17-5 in 47 games with an .883, a 3.14 average and 2 shutouts, facing 1,162 shots.

The club’s goaltending came in 42.1 goals worse than the chances faced — 32nd in the league, and by a distance. Philadelphia was 4th in the league at suppressing chances at even strength and conceded 286 goals. He was the largest single share of that.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 194 and the technique is orthodox and unspectacular. He is square to the puck and he plays a conventional depth, neither deep in his net nor out challenging.

The rebound control is the problem. Pucks come off him into the slot rather than to the corners, and behind a club that concedes as few first chances as this one does, the second chance is where the season went. The lateral recovery is ordinary and the glove has been beaten from distance more often than it should be. He handles the puck adequately.

The Mental Game

He has now played two seasons as the number one and posted an .8904 and an .883, and he did not visibly come apart in either of them.

There is a version of this where a young goaltender given a job too early on a bad club is ruined by it, and there is a version where he is fine and the sample is the club. Two seasons at this level is beginning to be enough to answer that.

The Intangibles

A fifth-round pick in 2018 out of Sweden, and 110 NHL games in with a career .8882.

He is 25. Dan Vladar was signed in the summer, which is the club saying out loud that the job is no longer his by default.

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.

  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
  • 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

    “**The rebound control is the problem.** Pucks come off him into the slot rather than to the corners, and behind a club that concedes as few first chances as this one does, the second chance is where the season went.”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The lateral recovery is ordinary and the glove has been beaten from distance more often than it should be.”

  • puck-handlingpresent and ordinary· starts the breakout himself

    “He handles the puck adequately.”

  • plays-deeppresent and ordinary· takes the net away by occupying it

    “He is square to the puck and he plays a conventional depth, neither deep in his net nor out challenging.”