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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1

Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen

Buffalo Sabres Goaltender

An .8866 across 55 games, and the single largest reason a club that finished 1st in finishing missed the playoffs.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21BUF4130143.880149.906
2021-22BUF9252232.740277.917
2022-23BUF33171141153.6101054.891
2023-24BUF54272241322.5751470.910
2024-25BUF55242451693.2021490.887
2025-26 so far——————————
Career—1557165154533.0674440.898

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

24-24-5 in 55 games, .8866 with a 3.20 average and 2 shutouts on 1,490 shots.

Buffalo’s goaltending came in 15.8 goals worse than the chances faced, 26th in the league, in front of a defence that was 24th at suppressing them. The club finished 1st in the league in finishing, 32.6 goals above expectation, and still had a minus-22 goal differential. This is where it went.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 223, and he plays a large, positional game — deep in the crease, square, relying on covering space rather than on reacting.

The lateral quickness is the specific weakness. A puck moved across the slot finds him late and he arrives at the second chance later still, and the rebound control is ordinary, which compounds it. Behind a club that concedes as many interior chances as this one, that is the wrong set of flaws in the wrong place.

The Mental Game

He signed a five-year contract on the strength of one good half-season and then had the worst full year of his career, which is a difficult sequence at 26.

There is no visible quit in him and no record of a bad goal becoming a bad period. There is also no stretch of consistency longer than about two months anywhere in his professional record.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick, six years in the organisation, and the starting job by default rather than by winning it.

The club is committed to him and has no alternative, and the honest reading is that a .887 is not a level any team makes the playoffs with. Everything Buffalo did well last season — and it led the league in finishing — was undone here.

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

    “6-5 and 223, and he plays a large, positional game — deep in the crease, square, relying on covering space rather than on reacting.”

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

    “The lateral quickness is the specific weakness. A puck moved across the slot finds him late and he arrives at the second chance later still”

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

    “the rebound control is ordinary, which compounds it”