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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1

Thomas Greiss

St. Louis Blues Goaltender

A .8907 that is 52nd of the 53 who played twenty-five games, against a career .9122 across 9,534 shots.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2007-08SJS301173.26050.860
2009-10SJS16741352.680399.912
2011-12SJS19971402.300472.915
2012-13SJS6140132.531153.915
2013-14PHX251085502.292626.920
2014-15PIT20963502.590546.908
2015-16NYI4123114902.3611197.925
2016-17NYI51261851262.6931453.913
2017-18NYI271382953.821879.892
2018-19NYI4323142872.2851185.927
2019-20NYI311694732.740838.913
2020-21DET348158792.702894.912
2021-22DET3110151923.660842.891
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—347155120378372.72159534.912

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

31 games for Detroit, 10-15-1, a .8907 save percentage and a 3.66 goals-against, no shutouts on 842 shots. That is 52nd of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games — only one man in the league was worse. Ninety-fourth overall in 2004 by San Jose — the third round — thirteen seasons, 347 games.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 219 pounds, and 36 years old.

Thirteen seasons and 9,534 career shots at .9122, which is a large and stable body of evidence pointed the other way from last season.

Nine of those thirteen years fall between .9084 and .9266. Only two have gone below .9000: .8919 across 879 shots in 2017-18 and .8907 across 842 last season.

The two worst years of a thirteen-year career are four seasons apart, and last season is the worse of the two.

His best season was .9266 across 1,185 shots at 33. He was above .9110 in each of the two years that followed it — .9129 and .9116 — and then dropped 209 points in one.

The Mental Game

Detroit rated 25th in the league in goaltending at minus-14.0, and the crease also carried Alex Nedeljkovic, whose .9009 across fifty-nine games was 39th of the same 53. The skaters in front finished 28th in attempt share and 30th in chances, and gave up 312 goals — the third-most in the league.

That is a genuine alibi and it is not a complete one, because the two men shared the same structure and finished 39th and 52nd of fifty-three.

He arrives at a club that finished 26th in attempt share, scored 311 goals and traded away a .9191.

The Intangibles

Nothing here measures technique, rebound control or how he handles a screen.

What it measures is 9,534 shots at .9122 across thirteen seasons from a 36-year-old, and one season 215 points beneath his own career figure.

Jordan Binnington is 29 and has declined in each of his four full seasons. Greiss is 36 and has just produced the second-worst year of thirteen. A club that was 10th in goaltending last season on the strength of a man who has left is entering next year with those two, and the record gives no reason to expect the rating survives.