Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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35

Samuel Montembeault

Montreal Canadiens Goaltender

Three NHL seasons at .8936, .8904 and .8915 — the most consistent bad save percentage in the book.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19FLA11432303.040282.894
2019-20FLA14551393.340356.890
2021-22MTL3881861223.7711124.891
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—63172691913.5411762.892

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

38 games, 8-18-6, a .8915 save percentage and a 3.77 goals-against, one shutout on 1,124 shots. That is 50th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games — fourth from the bottom.

Seventy-seventh overall in 2015, and 63 NHL games at 26.

The Physical Game

The career record is the striking part, and not in a good way. Three seasons of NHL work: .8936, .8904, .8915. Career .8916 across 1,762 shots.

Almost no goaltender in this book has a record that consistent, and none of the consistent ones sits this low. A save percentage that repeats to within three thousandths across three separate seasons is not variance; it is a level.

The Mental Game

The club in front of him allowed the most goals in the league, finished 28th in expected goals against per 60 and 31st on the kill. Every one of those facts is real and Montreal still rated 23rd in goaltending after adjusting for shot quality.

He faced 1,124 shots and stopped 1,002 of them. Jake Allen, on the same club, in the same season, behind the same defence, stopped .9047. That is the cleanest available comparison and it goes against him by 132 points of save percentage.

The Intangibles

He is 26 and has now played thirty-eight games in a season for the first time.

A club whose only path forward is developing young players has handed the largest share of its crease to a goaltender with a three-year track record at .8916. Nothing in this repo measures technique or temperament, and nothing in the results argues that the technique is about to change.

The honest reading is that this is a backup’s record being asked to do a starter’s job.