Armchair Hockey Scout

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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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35

Samuel Montembeault

Montreal Canadiens Goaltender

Three seasons under .8940 and then a .9011, behind the club that conceded the third-most goals in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2018-19FLA11432303.040282.894
2019-20FLA14551393.340356.890
2021-22MTL3881861223.7711124.891
2022-23MTL40161931333.4201345.901
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1033345123243.4913107.896

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

16-19-3 in 40 games, .9011, 3.42, no shutouts on 1,345 shots.

A 3.42 goals-against average is a bad-looking number in front of a club that conceded 307 goals, the third-most in the league, and finished thirtieth in expected goals against per sixty at even strength.

The .9011 is the first time in four seasons he has been above .900. The three before it read .8936, .8904 and .8915.

Montreal’s goaltending value finished twenty-fourth. Allen played forty-two games at .8914; this was the better half of the crease.

Four seasons, 103 games.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 218, and a large, upright, positional style.

He is at his best on the first shot and his worst on the second. Rebound control is the visible weakness — pucks come off him into the slot rather than to the corners — and on a club that concedes the volume Montreal concedes, that is the difference between .900 and .910.

Thirty-three and a half shots a game across forty games. Very few goaltenders in this book faced more per night.

The Intangibles

Seventy-seventh overall in 2015 to Florida, claimed on waivers by Montreal at twenty-five, and 103 NHL games since.

He is twenty-six and has never been a first choice anywhere until now. The .9011 arrived in the season the club was worst in front of him, which is the encouraging way to read it.

The cautious way to read it is that 103 games is not enough to know, and three of his four seasons say .893.

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

    “Rebound control is the visible weakness — pucks come off him into the slot rather than to the corners — and on a club that concedes the volume Montreal concedes, that is the difference between .900 and .910.”