This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Aleksander Barkov
Florida Panthers Center
Seventy-eight points and eight penalty minutes, and he covers more ground per game than most defencemen.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | FLA | 54 | 8 | 16 | 24 | -3 | 10 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 87 | 9.2 | 17:06 |
| 2014-15 | FLA | 71 | 16 | 20 | 36 | -4 | 16 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 123 | 13.0 | 17:30 |
| 2015-16 | FLA | 66 | 28 | 31 | 59 | +18 | 8 | 9 | 1 | 8 | 171 | 16.4 | 19:26 |
| 2016-17 | FLA | 61 | 21 | 31 | 52 | +13 | 10 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 142 | 14.8 | 19:24 |
| 2017-18 | FLA | 79 | 27 | 51 | 78 | +9 | 14 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 256 | 10.5 | 22:04 |
| 2018-19 | FLA | 82 | 35 | 61 | 96 | -3 | 8 | 13 | 0 | 5 | 206 | 17.0 | 22:21 |
| 2019-20 | FLA | 66 | 20 | 42 | 62 | +2 | 18 | 7 | 0 | 2 | 172 | 11.6 | 20:01 |
| 2020-21 | FLA | 50 | 26 | 32 | 58 | +12 | 14 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 176 | 14.8 | 20:56 |
| 2021-22 | FLA | 67 | 39 | 49 | 88 | +36 | 18 | 12 | 4 | 5 | 214 | 18.2 | 20:18 |
| 2022-23 | FLA | 68 | 23 | 55 | 78 | +10 | 8 | 8 | 1 | 6 | 208 | 11.1 | 21:13 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 664 | 243 | 388 | 631 | +90 | 124 | 70 | 12 | 44 | 1755 | 13.9 | 20:09 |
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
23 goals and 55 assists in 68 games — 78 points — with eight penalty minutes. Plus-10, 21:13 a night, 208 shots at 11.1 per cent, six game-winners.
Eight penalty minutes across sixty-eight games is four minor penalties in a season played at twenty-one minutes a night, most of it against the other club’s best line.
55.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 87th percentile, with his ice at 53-40 against an expectation of 45.97-37.37.
He has played eighty games once in ten seasons. The production per game is not the question; the availability is.
Ten seasons, 664 games, 631 points, all of them in Florida.
The Finesse Game
208 shots at a median of 27 feet, 36 per cent from inside twenty.
Beyond forty feet: 43 shots on goal, 2 goals, 4.65 per cent. Inside forty: 162 shots, 21 goals, 12.96 per cent.
Eight of his tracked shots were tip-ins and eight more were deflections, which is a high share for a first-line centre and describes a man who plays the puck at the net rather than through the crowd.
92.0 mph at the 59th percentile — an ordinary registered shot on a player whose scoring has never depended on it. 55 assists against 23 goals is the split of a distributor.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 214, and eight penalty minutes.
The tracking: top speed 22.4 mph, the 55th percentile; bursts 1.5 a game, the 74th; 3.40 miles a game, the 95th percentile. That distance figure is a defenceman’s number on a forward, and among Florida skaters only Montour covered more.
The physical game here is positional rather than punitive. He is big enough to hold the puck against pressure and he uses the reach on the defensive side, taking away lanes instead of bodies. That is also why the penalty minutes stay where they are.
The Intangibles
He is the captain, he kills penalties, and he took a shorthanded goal doing it. His 47.2 per cent offensive-zone start share is the 34th percentile, so the deployment was mildly against him and the chance share is his own.
Second overall in 2013 out of Tampere, in the league at eighteen, and he has never played for another organisation.
What the numbers cannot settle is how much of Florida’s 2nd-ranked expected-goals rate at even strength is the club’s system and how much is one centre who wins the puck back. The chance share moves with him, but so does the wing he plays with.
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.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- 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.
- disciplined· stays out of the box
0.12 penalty minutes a game over 68, 8th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
“He is the captain, he kills penalties, and he took a shorthanded goal doing it.”
“He is the captain, he kills penalties, and he took a shorthanded goal doing it.”
“He is big enough to hold the puck against pressure and he uses the reach on the defensive side, taking away lanes instead of bodies.”
“55 assists against 23 goals is the split of a distributor.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 930 minutes
- Expected goals
- 55.2%
- 87th pct
- Shot attempts
- 57%
- 95th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 53 for, 40 against. Expected: 46.0 and 37.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 11 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 — 82 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 · 68 games
- Top speed
- 22.4 mph
- 61st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.51 a game
- Distance
- 3.40 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 92.0 mph
- 78th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 · 930 minutes at five-on-five
- Sam Reinhart48%
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 55.2% — 1.6 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second line, 930 minutes at five-on-five — 51st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carter Verhaeghe | 55.2% | 55.1% | 55.7% |
| Gustav Forsling | 50.6% | 60.3% | 52.0% |
| Sam Reinhart | 55.1% | 55.2% | 56.0% |
55.2% together, 55.1% for him apart and 55.7% for Verhaeghe 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
276 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 24 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 36% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.