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.
← 2023-24 edition

This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

35

Thatcher Demko

Vancouver Canucks Goaltender

A .9015 in a thirty-two-game season, behind the twenty-ninth-ranked goaltending in the league.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2017-18VAN110043.91030.867
2018-19VAN9431252.810288.913
2019-20VAN2713102783.060822.905
2020-21VAN3516181992.8511164.915
2021-22VAN64332271682.7211967.915
2022-23VAN3214144993.1611005.901
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1688167154732.9035276.910

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

14-14-4 in 32 games, .9015, 3.16, one shutout on 1,005 shots.

That is twentieth of the 35 goaltenders in this book who faced a thousand shots, and those 35 stopped .9067 between them. On 1,005 shots the distance from that rate to his is about five goals.

Thirty-two games, ended by injury, after 64 the season before.

Vancouver’s goaltending was worth minus-20.2 goals against the chances it faced, twenty-ninth in the league — the fourth-worst in the NHL and the single largest reason a club that finished fourth in finishing finished twenty-second in the standings.

31.4 shots a night behind a team that finished twenty-fourth in chance share.

Six seasons, 168 games, a career .9103.

The Finesse Game

6-4 and 192 pounds, which is tall and light, and he plays a controlled, upright, positionally exact game that depends on being square rather than on being quick.

He is positionally excellent and does not scramble, and when he is healthy the puck hits him rather than being saved.

The glove is a genuine strength. He tracks the puck through a screen better than most, which is a reading rather than a measurement: this project has no data on what a goaltender can see.

The rebound control is good and the recovery after the first save is where the season went wrong. Behind a club that finished twentieth in expected goals against per sixty he was asked to make second and third saves constantly, and at thirty-two games of fitness he did not always get there.

The seasons read .9132 on 288 shots, .9051 on 822, .9149 on 1,164, .9146 on 1,967 and .9015 on 1,005. The 2021-22 season — 64 games, .9146, on nearly two thousand shots behind a bad team — is the one this file rests on, and last season is the one that put a question against it.

A career .9103 on 5,276 shots is the honest middle.

The Intangibles

Thirty-sixth overall in 2014, the second round, six seasons, 168 games, all of them here.

81 wins, three shutouts, and a career .9103.

He is twenty-seven, the club’s starter, coming off the worst full season of his career and an injury that cost him half of it.

Everything Vancouver does next depends on which of the last two seasons is the real one. A club with the fourth-best finishing in the league and the twenty-ninth-best goaltending is a club with exactly one thing to fix, and it is this file.

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

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.

  • tracks-traffica strength· finds it through a screen

    “He tracks the puck through a screen better than most, which is a reading rather than a measurement: this project has no data on what a goaltender can see.”

  • rebound-controla strength· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is good and the recovery after the first save is where the season went wrong.”