Armchair Hockey Scout

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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.
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33

Ville Husso

Detroit Red Wings Goaltender

A .9191 in St. Louis, a contract, and then a .8958 in 56 games.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2020-21STL17961493.211460.893
2021-22STL4025761002.5621236.919
2022-23DET56262271673.1141603.896
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—1136035143162.9373299.904

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

56 games, 26-22-7, .8958, 3.11, four shutouts on 1,603 shots.

The year before, in St. Louis, he played 40 games and posted .9191. The difference between those two numbers is the difference between a starting goaltender and a problem.

Detroit’s goaltending graded minus-20, 28th in the league. He played 56 of the 82 games and James Reimer’s .8899 across 43 more is not an alibi.

Three NHL seasons, 113 games.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 205. The technique is a conventional blocking game — he is square, he is deep, and he relies on size rather than on reading the release.

The rebound is where the season went. He does not consistently control the first save, and behind a club that finished 15th in expected goals against — which is to say a defence that was not the problem — a .8958 has to come from somewhere.

Against clean shots from range he is fine. Against traffic and second chances the record is poor, and Detroit conceded 279 goals.

The Intangibles

94th overall in 2014 out of Helsinki, five seasons in the Finnish league and the American league, and a first NHL season at 26.

St. Louis let him go after the .9191. Detroit gave him three years and the starting job at 27.

One good half-season and one bad full one is the entire NHL record. It is not enough to conclude anything, and the club has committed as though it were.

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
  • 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.

  • rebound-controlhe lacks it· where the second chance ends up

    “He does not consistently control the first save, and behind a club that finished 15th in expected goals against — which is to say a defence that was not the problem — a .8958 has to come from somewhere.”

  • plays-deepa strength· takes the net away by occupying it

    “he is square, he is deep, and he relies on size rather than on reading the release”

  • tracks-traffiche lacks it· finds it through a screen

    “Against traffic and second chances the record is poor, and Detroit conceded 279 goals.”