This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Alex DeBrincat
Detroit Red Wings Right Wing
Twenty-seven goals and minus-31, and not one of them from beyond forty feet on 53 attempts.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | CHI | 82 | 28 | 24 | 52 | +6 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 181 | 15.5 | 14:48 |
| 2018-19 | CHI | 82 | 41 | 35 | 76 | 0 | 15 | 13 | 0 | 3 | 220 | 18.6 | 17:42 |
| 2019-20 | CHI | 70 | 18 | 27 | 45 | -10 | 15 | 10 | 0 | 4 | 207 | 8.7 | 17:30 |
| 2020-21 | CHI | 52 | 32 | 24 | 56 | +3 | 12 | 9 | 1 | 7 | 155 | 20.6 | 20:32 |
| 2021-22 | CHI | 82 | 41 | 37 | 78 | -13 | 19 | 14 | 0 | 6 | 270 | 15.2 | 20:51 |
| 2022-23 | OTT | 82 | 27 | 39 | 66 | -31 | 45 | 11 | 0 | 6 | 263 | 10.3 | 19:00 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 450 | 187 | 186 | 373 | -45 | 112 | 63 | 1 | 27 | 1296 | 14.4 | 18:17 |
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
27 goals and 39 assists in all 82 games for Ottawa, minus-31, 19:00 a night, 263 shots at 10.3 per cent.
That is his lowest shooting percentage in six seasons, and the two before it were 41-goal years.
50.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 54th percentile — a shade above average — with his ice at 42-58 against an expectation of 51.39-50.91. Nine goals short at the offensive end and seven long at the defensive one, which is a sixteen-goal swing away from the chances and almost entirely explains the minus-31.
Six seasons, 450 games, 187 goals.
The Finesse Game
263 shots at a median of 28 feet, 30 per cent from inside twenty and 20 per cent from beyond forty.
Inside forty: 210 shots on goal, 28 goals, 13.33 per cent. Beyond forty: 53 shots, none.
Fifty-three long shots and nothing to show for them, from one of the better pure scorers in the league. That is the forty-foot split at its most useful: he is not a distance shooter and the fifth of his volume he spends out there is a loss.
86.4 mph at the 19th percentile — a soft shot, and 187 goals in 450 games says it has never mattered. 160 of his attempts were wrist shots.
The Physical Game
5-8 and 180 pounds — one of the smallest players in the league — and the skating is ordinary rather than exceptional: 22.4 mph at the 54th percentile, 1.2 bursts a game at the 63rd, 3.17 miles a game at the 88th.
The mileage is the interesting number. He covers a great deal of ground for a small winger, which is how a 5-8 player survives nineteen minutes a night.
45 penalty minutes in 82 games is his career high by a distance and reads as a season of frustration on a club going nowhere.
The Intangibles
39th overall in 2016 — a second-round pick because of his size, after 51 goals in his draft year in Erie — and 187 goals in six years since.
He is from Farmington Hills, twenty minutes from the rink, and Detroit traded for him in July.
The minus-31 will follow him and the chance model says two-thirds of it was not his. What is his is the 53 shots from beyond forty feet.
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
- 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.
- durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“he is not a distance shooter and the fifth of his volume he spends out there is a loss”
“5-8 and 180 pounds — one of the smallest players in the league”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,153 minutes
- Expected goals
- 50.2%
- 55th pct
- Shot attempts
- 50.4%
- 56th 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: 42 for, 58 against. Expected: 51.4 and 50.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 7 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 — 65 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 · 82 games
- Top speed
- 22.4 mph
- 60th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.18 a game
- Distance
- 3.17 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 86.4 mph
- 45th 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 with OTT · 1153 minutes at five-on-five
- Shane Pinto54%
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
- OTT took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.2% — 0.8 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second line, 1,153 minutes at five-on-five — 79th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shane Pinto | 50.3% | 50.2% | 50.1% |
| Drake Batherson | 49.7% | 50.8% | 52.6% |
| Claude Giroux | 53.6% | 48.1% | 55.4% |
50.3% together, 50.2% for him apart and 50.1% for Pinto 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
345 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 28 of them goals. His median goal came from 19 feet. 31% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 20% from beyond forty.