Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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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72

Sergei Bobrovsky

Florida Panthers Goaltender

A .9125 across 54 games — 19th of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 or more — on a club that faced the fewest chances of any.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2010-11PHI54281381302.5901527.915
2011-12PHI2914102783.020769.899
2012-13CBJ3821116742.0041084.932
2013-14CBJ58322051312.3851699.923
2014-15CBJ51301731342.6821632.918
2015-16CBJ3715191972.7511049.907
2016-17CBJ63411751272.0671854.931
2017-18CBJ65372261582.4251993.921
2018-19CBJ62372411532.5891756.913
2019-20FLA50231961513.2311505.900
2020-21FLA311982882.910935.906
2021-22FLA5439731372.6731566.912
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—5923361874814582.573717369.916

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

54 games, 39-7-3, .9125 and 2.67 with three shutouts on 1,566 shots. Nineteenth of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more.

Thirty-nine wins on a club that took 122 points. Florida’s goaltending as a whole came in 13th in the league at plus-2.2 goals against the chances faced — which is the honest frame: this crease was slightly better than the shots it saw, and the shots it saw were the easiest in the league.

Ten playoff games: 303 shots, 276 saves, .9109, four wins and six losses, as Florida beat Washington in six and was swept by Tampa Bay.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 180, which is light for the modern position and has been the whole of his career.

Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender’s glove, his push, his rebound control or how deep he plays. What it has is shots and goals, and 1,566 shots is a very large sample. A .9125 on that volume is a real number and an ordinary one.

The career is the other half. 592 NHL games and 336 wins across twelve seasons, at a career .9161, with a .9317 and a .9315 in Columbus. This is not a career in doubt; it is a career at 34.

The Mental Game

Thirty-four years old, and the last three seasons have gone .8997, .9059 and .9125 — which is a recovery, and it happened on the best defensive club he has played for.

Florida allowed 2.603 expected goals per 60 at even strength, 14th in the league, and 56.5 per cent of the chances went its way, first in the league. Almost none of the shots he faced were the hard ones.

Nothing in this repo speaks to how a goaltender handles a spring in which his club won 58 games and lost four straight in May. This book will not pretend it does.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Russia, and 592 NHL games at 34 with 336 wins and 37 shutouts.

Nobody drafted him and only Marc-Andre Fleury and Jonathan Quick have more wins among the 72 goaltenders in this edition, which is the shape of a career that began in a league nobody was scouting for goaltenders.

Behind him is Spencer Knight, 21, with 36 NHL games. The club has a 21-year-old first-round goaltender sitting behind a 34-year-old whose last three seasons read .8997, .9059 and .9125, and the next two are about which of those two facts governs.

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

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-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender's glove, his push, his rebound control or how deep he plays.”

  • undraftedpresent and ordinary· arrived without a pick attached

    “Nobody drafted him and only Marc-Andre Fleury and Jonathan Quick have more wins among the 72 goaltenders in this edition”