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.
← 2022-23 edition

This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

74

Stuart Skinner

Edmonton Oilers Goaltender

A .9128 across 13 games and 367 shots — a fortnight of hockey, and the whole of the NHL record.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21EDM110055.03038.868
2021-22EDM13660322.621367.913
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—14760372.801405.909

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

13 games, 6-6-0, .9128 and 2.62 with one shutout on 367 shots.

Three hundred and sixty-seven shots is well short of anything this book will call a season, and thirteen games is not enough to place him against the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five. What can be said is that the number is respectable and that it is small.

Edmonton’s goaltending as a whole came in 17th in the league at minus-3.4 goals against the chances faced, across four men.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 215, which is large even by the standard the position now sets.

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. What it has is shots and goals. At 367 shots the confidence interval around .9128 is wide enough to contain both a starter and a career backup.

A career .9086 across 14 games is the whole file, and it is one fortnight plus one appearance.

The Mental Game

Twenty-three years old, from Edmonton, drafted by Edmonton, and the backup on a club that went to the conference final.

Jack Campbell arrives with 135 NHL games and two starter’s seasons. The job here is twenty to twenty-five starts behind him, and nothing in this repo says what a 23-year-old does with that.

The Intangibles

Seventy-eighth overall in 2017, the third round, and 14 NHL games at 23.

Mikko Koskinen and Mike Smith are both off the roster — 73 games between them last season, at .9026 and .9153. That is the whole of the crease turning over in one summer, and the man who returns is the one with fourteen career games.

The club has bought Campbell and kept him. If the .9128 is real, Edmonton has a goaltender for a decade; if it is thirteen games, the club has a backup and a problem it has not solved. Nothing available here distinguishes those two.

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”