Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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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41

Scott Wedgewood

Dallas Stars Goaltender

A .9154 in 21 games behind the third-best defence in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2015-16NJD421151.251116.957
2017-18ARI20594633.451587.893
2020-21NJD16383463.112458.900
2021-22NJD/ARI/DAL37131561103.1411218.910
2022-23DAL21983512.721603.915
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—983241172753.0262982.908

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

21 games, 9-8-3, .9154, 2.72, one shutout on 603 shots.

That is comfortably the best full backup season of his career, and Dallas’s tandem is the reason the club’s goaltending graded plus-11.9 and seventh in the league: Oettinger at .9189 and Wedgewood at .9154, with no third goaltender needed.

Five NHL seasons, 98 games, and three organisations.

The Finesse Game

6-2 and 201, which is small for a modern goaltender, and the game is built accordingly: he plays deep, stays compact and relies on reading the release rather than on covering the net by size.

Rebound control is the weaker half. He gives up second chances at the sort of rate that gets punished by a club with a good power play, and behind Dallas — third in the league in goals against — it mostly did not matter.

He handles the puck competently and Dallas use him the same way they use Oettinger, which is to say sparingly.

The Intangibles

84th overall in 2010 to New Jersey, and a decade of American-league hockey and waiver claims before a settled NHL job at 29.

He is 31, has 98 games, and last season was the first in which he was clearly good. Twenty starts behind the third-best defensive club in the league is the most favourable circumstance a backup can be given, and the honest reading of a .9154 is that a good share of it belongs to the club.

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.

  • a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
  • 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.

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “he plays deep, stays compact and relies on reading the release rather than on covering the net by size”

  • rebound-controlhe lacks it· where the second chance ends up

    “He gives up second chances at the sort of rate that gets punished by a club with a good power play”