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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33

Ville Husso

Detroit Red Wings Goaltender

A .9191 across 40 games, 7th of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 or more — on 1,236 shots and nothing else.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21STL17961493.211460.893
2021-22STL4025761002.5621236.919
2022-23 so far——————————
Career—57341371492.7431696.912

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

40 games, 25-7-6, .9191 and 2.56 with two shutouts on 1,236 shots for St Louis. Seventh of the 53 goaltenders who played 25 games or more — ahead of Juuse Saros, Linus Ullmark, Andrei Vasilevskiy and Thatcher Demko.

That is the best save percentage any Detroit goaltender brings into this season — .9191 against Alex Nedeljkovic’s .9009 — and it was posted somewhere else, behind a club that finished 9th in the league and 2nd at finishing.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 205, which is at the size the position now selects for and one reason the .9191 is not a surprise on its face.

Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender’s glove, his rebound control, his push or how deep he plays. What it has is shots and goals. 1,236 shots is a real sample and it is one season, and the difference between those two statements is the whole question about him.

Read the record either way and it is honest: .8935 on 460 shots in 2020-21 and .9191 on 1,236 in 2021-22. Those are two seasons, one bad and one very good, and 1,696 career shots is not enough to say which is the goaltender.

The Mental Game

Twenty-seven years old, with 57 NHL games, arriving as a number one on a club that gave up 312 goals last year — the third-most in the league.

St Louis conceded 242. Detroit conceded 312. He has never faced a workload like the one in front of him, and no figure in this repo speaks to whether a 27-year-old with one good season can carry it.

The Intangibles

Ninety-fourth overall in 2014, the fourth round, and 57 NHL games at 27 with a career .9121.

Eight years between the draft and a starter’s season, and seventeen NHL games before the one just finished. Nothing about that record suggests a man who arrived early or easily.

Detroit’s goaltending came in 25th in the league last season at minus-14 goals against the chances it faced. The bar he has to clear is low, the sample he is clearing it on is one season, and the club has committed a starter’s job to it.

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.

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

    “Nothing in this repo measures a goaltender's glove, his rebound control, his push or how deep he plays.”