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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30

Spencer Knight

Florida Panthers Goaltender

A .9075 across 32 games at 20 — 30th of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 or more, on the best club in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21FLA440082.32099.919
2021-22FLA321993812.792876.907
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—362393892.742975.909

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

32 games, 19-9-3, .9075 and 2.79 with two shutouts on 876 shots, at 20 years old. Thirtieth of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more.

Read it against the club. Florida took 56.5 per cent of the chances, first in the league, and allowed the 15th-lowest rate of expected goals against at even strength. A .9075 behind that is a below-average season and the wins column will not say so.

He did not play in the playoffs.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 191, which is at the size the position now selects for and considerably larger than the man ahead of him.

Nothing in this repo measures rebound control, lateral push, glove or how deep a goaltender plays — which is most of what separates one from another at this level. What the repo has is shots and goals. At 876 shots the number is starting to mean something and it is not yet a season.

A career .9087 across 36 games is the whole file.

The Mental Game

Twenty-one years old, and he has played thirty-six NHL games behind the best defensive structure in the league. That is the softest possible introduction to the position and the hardest possible baseline to improve on.

Sergei Bobrovsky is 34 and went .9125 last season. The club is not obliged to move him and the young man is not obliged to be ready.

Nothing in this repo speaks to what a 21-year-old does with a season of waiting.

The Intangibles

Thirteenth overall in 2019, the highest a goaltender went in that draft, and 36 NHL games at 21.

Four games at 19 at a .9192, and thirty-two at 20 at a .9075.

The honest reading is the plainest one. A .9075 on 876 shots in front of the club that faced the fewest dangerous chances in hockey is not yet evidence of anything, and the two ways it can go — a starter by 23, or a good backup for a decade — are both entirely open. This book would rather say that than pick one.

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 rebound control, lateral push, glove or how deep a goaltender plays”