This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Aaron Ekblad

First overall in 2014, nine seasons in one place, and he has not played eighty games since 2018-19.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2014-15	FLA	81	12	27	39	+12	32	6	0	4	170	7.1	21:49
2015-16	FLA	78	15	21	36	+18	41	3	0	4	182	8.2	21:41
2016-17	FLA	68	10	11	21	-23	58	4	1	2	225	4.4	21:28
2017-18	FLA	82	16	22	38	+9	71	5	0	4	189	8.5	23:23
2018-19	FLA	82	13	24	37	+1	47	5	0	1	180	7.2	23:39
2019-20	FLA	67	5	36	41	+12	26	0	0	1	147	3.4	22:59
2020-21	FLA	35	11	11	22	+5	33	6	0	3	101	10.9	25:05
2021-22	FLA	61	15	42	57	+38	26	3	0	2	180	8.3	24:55
2022-23	FLA	71	14	24	38	-14	68	8	1	2	216	6.5	23:24
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	625	111	218	329	+58	402	40	2	23	1590	7.0	22:60

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

14 goals and 24 assists in 71 games — 38 points — with eight of the goals on the power play. Minus-14, 23:24 a night, 216 shots, 68 penalty minutes.

The minus-14 is the worst figure on the Florida roster, and unlike Reinhart’s it is not purely percentages: 52.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 72nd percentile, with his ice at 52-59 against an expectation of 58.54-52.63. Six short at one end, seven long at the other, and this time the chance share was ordinary rather than excellent.

The availability is the report: 35 games of 56 in 2020-21, 61 of 82 in 2021-22, 71 of 82 in 2022-23. He has played a full season once since 2018-19, and that was the shortened one.

Nine seasons, 625 games, 329 points, all of them in Florida.

The Finesse Game

216 shots at a median of 45 feet, 12 per cent from inside twenty and 61 per cent from beyond forty. Two hundred and sixteen shots is fifth among all defencemen in the league.

Beyond forty: 129 shots on goal, 3 goals, 2.33 per cent — below the league rate for defencemen. Inside forty: 86 shots, 11 goals, 12.79 per cent.

Seventy-three slap shots, the most of any Florida defenceman. He is the club’s designated point shot on the power play and eight of his fourteen goals came there.

94.1 mph at the 72nd percentile.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 220, and 68 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.1 mph, the 42nd percentile; bursts 0.5 a game, the 26th; 3.30 miles a game, the 94th. A great deal of ground at no speed at all, which is the ordinary top-pair reading rather than a criticism.

He is the one Florida defenceman with the size to clear a crease, and at 220 pounds he is the club’s answer to the heavy forward. Whether the knees and shoulders let him keep doing it is the whole question about him.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2014 at eighteen, Calder winner in his first season, and he has never played anywhere else.

50.7 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 49th percentile.

The career high of 57 points came in 2021-22 in sixty-one games — a 76-point pace he has never been healthy enough to complete. That is the report on him in one line: the rate has always been there and the games have not.

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

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.

clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He is the one Florida defenceman with the size to clear a crease, and at 220 pounds he is the club's answer to the heavy forward.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,184 minutes

Expected goals: 52.7%; 72nd pct
Shot attempts: 54.6%; 88th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 52 for, 59 against. Expected: 58.5 and 52.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

80th

Numbers

72nd

The two rank him within 8 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.

Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 73 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 71 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 70th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.52 a game
Distance: 3.30 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.1 mph; 64th pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 1184 minutes at five-on-five

Gustav Forsling78%
Marc Staalnow PHI9%

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2022-23

The club: FLA took 53.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.7% — 0.9 below the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,184 minutes at five-on-five — 81st percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Gustav Forsling	52.3%	54.1%	50.4%
Matthew Tkachuk	55.6%	50.5%	63.5%
Carter Verhaeghe	51.6%	53.3%	57.6%

52.3% together, 54.1% for him apart and 50.4% for Forsling apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

281 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 14 of them goals. His median goal came from 22 feet. 12% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 61% from beyond forty.