Scott Wedgewood

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

37 games, 13-15-6, .9097 and 3.14 with one shutout on 1,218 shots, for New Jersey, Arizona and Dallas. Twenty-sixth of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more — the middle of the league, in the two worst situations in it.

It was by a distance the most work of his career. He had 40 NHL games in the six seasons before this one and 37 in this one alone.

The eight he played in Dallas are the ones that matter to this chapter and eight games is not a sample.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 201, which is small by the standard the position now sets and is one reason it took him until 30 to get a season.

Nothing here measures rebound control, lateral push or how deep he plays, which is most of what separates a backup from a starter. What the repo has is shots and goals, and .9097 on 1,218 shots is a real number and an ordinary one.

Read it against the clubs. New Jersey’s goaltending came in 32nd in the league against the chances it faced, at minus-43.3 goals, and Arizona’s 30th at minus-31.9 — the two worst crease situations in hockey, and he spent most of the season in them. A .9097 in that company is better than it looks, and there is no way to prove that from this file: the goaltending residual is computed per club and not per goaltender, and both clubs had other men in net whose numbers are inside those figures alongside his.

The Mental Game

Thirty years old, in his fourth NHL season by the calendar and his first by the workload.

Three organisations in one year, and eight games at the end of it in Dallas. Whatever the position asks of a man who dresses in three buildings in six months, it is not in this repo.

The Intangibles

Eighty-fourth overall in 2010, the third round, and 77 NHL games at 30 with a career .9058. Four seasons of NHL hockey, spread across twelve years since the draft: four games, twenty, sixteen, thirty-seven.

The busiest season of his career is the one just finished, and it is also his best save percentage in any season of more than twenty games — .8927 in twenty with Arizona, .8996 in sixteen with New Jersey, .9097 in thirty-seven. The trend is the right way up and the sample it is drawn from is tiny.

The job is twenty-five to thirty starts behind a 23-year-old who will play everything else. The .9097 says he can hold that; the seventy-seven career games say nobody should be surprised either way.