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 →

1

Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen

Buffalo Sabres Goaltender

A .9170 in 9 games at twenty-three, from a 6-5 second-round pick the club has been waiting on for five years.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21BUF4130143.880149.906
2021-22BUF9252232.740277.917
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—13382373.080426.913

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

9 games, 2-5-2, a .9170 save percentage and a 2.74 goals-against average, on 277 shots faced — 31 a night.

A .9170 across 277 shots is the best figure anybody in this crease produced last season, and 277 shots is nine games. His career line across 13 games is a .9131.

Buffalo’s goaltending finished 26.5 goals below the chances it faced, 28th in the league, and six goaltenders were used to produce that number.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 223, and the size is the first thing anybody says about him and has been since he was eighteen. He covers the lower half of the net standing up and the questions have always been about the recovery when he has to move.

Nine games is not enough evidence to settle any of them, and the honest position is that nobody outside the organisation knows yet.

The Mental Game

Thirteen NHL games spread across three seasons, interrupted by hip surgery at twenty and a long rehabilitation after it.

He has been the goaltender of the future here since 2017 and is now twenty-three, which is the age at which that description starts to expire.

The Intangibles

Fifty-fourth overall in 2017, out of Finland, and four seasons in Rochester and Cincinnati.

He is 23. Craig Anderson is 41 and Eric Comrie has 28 NHL games, so the net is genuinely available, and Buffalo has arranged its crease so that the twenty-three-year-old cannot be blamed for taking it and cannot be protected from having to.

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.

  • tracks-trafficpresent and ordinary· finds it through a screen

    “6-5 and 223, and the size is the first thing anybody says about him and has been since he was eighteen”