Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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74

Stuart Skinner

Edmonton Oilers Goaltender

An .8958 across 51 games, and the position that has now cost this club two Cup finals.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21EDM110055.03038.868
2021-22EDM13660322.621367.913
2022-23EDM50291451332.7511536.913
2023-24EDM59361651472.6221553.905
2024-25EDM51261841382.8131325.896
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—1749854144552.7374819.906

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

26-18-4 in 51 games, .8958 with a 2.81 average and 3 shutouts on 1,325 shots.

Edmonton’s goaltending came in 11.8 goals worse than the chances faced, 24th in the league, on a club that was 2nd in creating chances and 14th at preventing them. The team was outscored 165-162 at five-on-five against an expected 182-153. The crease is one of the two reasons for that.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 215, and the game is large and positional — deep, square, taking away the top of the net and relying on the chance being ordinary.

The lateral quickness is the specific weakness. A puck moved across the slot beats him more often than it should, and the rebound control is ordinary, which turns a save into a second chance. Against a club that moves the puck east-west in the offensive zone, he is a good deal more beatable than the frame suggests.

The Mental Game

The pattern is now four seasons long: stretches of genuinely good hockey separated by stretches where the same shots go in. He has been pulled repeatedly, benched in the playoffs twice, and returned each time without visible damage.

That resilience is real and it is not the same thing as consistency. There is no six-week stretch in his record where a club could stop worrying.

The Intangibles

A third-round pick, a hometown goaltender, and a starting job on a Cup contender that the organisation has never seriously challenged.

At 26 this is the largest open question on the roster. A club that is 2nd in the league at creating chances and has the best penalty kill in hockey has lost two finals, and the position that separates it from Florida is this 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.

  • a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
  • 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

    “the game is large and positional — deep, square, taking away the top of the net and relying on the chance being ordinary”

  • lateral-recoveryhe lacks it· post-to-post, and across the slot

    “The lateral quickness is the specific weakness. A puck moved across the slot beats him more often than it should”

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “the rebound control is ordinary, which turns a save into a second chance”