Alex Goligoski
Minnesota Wild Defense
Sixteen seasons, 1,042 games, and forty-four shots from beyond forty feet for no goals.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007-08 | PIT | 3 | 0 | 2 | 2 | +2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 13:56 |
| 2008-09 | PIT | 45 | 6 | 14 | 20 | +5 | 16 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 61 | 9.8 | 18:18 |
| 2009-10 | PIT | 69 | 8 | 29 | 37 | +7 | 22 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 98 | 8.2 | 21:25 |
| 2010-11 | PIT/DAL | 83 | 14 | 32 | 46 | +20 | 40 | 7 | 0 | 4 | 162 | 8.6 | 22:14 |
| 2011-12 | DAL | 71 | 9 | 21 | 30 | 0 | 16 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 140 | 6.4 | 22:46 |
| 2012-13 | DAL | 47 | 3 | 24 | 27 | +4 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 80 | 3.8 | 22:23 |
| 2013-14 | DAL | 81 | 6 | 36 | 42 | +9 | 28 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 141 | 4.3 | 24:19 |
| 2014-15 | DAL | 81 | 4 | 32 | 36 | 0 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 122 | 3.3 | 23:49 |
| 2015-16 | DAL | 82 | 5 | 32 | 37 | +21 | 34 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 127 | 3.9 | 23:50 |
| 2016-17 | ARI | 82 | 6 | 30 | 36 | -9 | 28 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 112 | 5.4 | 23:20 |
| 2017-18 | ARI | 78 | 12 | 23 | 35 | -31 | 26 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 119 | 10.1 | 23:17 |
| 2018-19 | ARI | 76 | 3 | 24 | 27 | -7 | 16 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 102 | 2.9 | 20:49 |
| 2019-20 | ARI | 70 | 4 | 28 | 32 | +8 | 24 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 101 | 4.0 | 23:03 |
| 2020-21 | ARI | 56 | 3 | 19 | 22 | +2 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 72 | 4.2 | 23:00 |
| 2021-22 | MIN | 72 | 2 | 28 | 30 | +41 | 34 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 80 | 2.5 | 18:56 |
| 2022-23 | MIN | 46 | 2 | 4 | 6 | -9 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 63 | 3.2 | 17:40 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 1042 | 87 | 378 | 465 | +63 | 358 | 26 | 1 | 11 | 1582 | 5.5 | 22:10 |
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
2 goals and 4 assists in 46 games — 6 points — at 17:40 a night. Minus-9, 63 shots, 16 penalty minutes.
Six points is the lowest full-season total of a sixteen-year career, and 46 games the second-lowest.
51.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 63rd percentile, with his ice at 21-33 against an expectation of 31.77-29.97 — eleven goals short at the offensive end, which on a club that finished twenty-ninth in finishing is the club.
Sixteen seasons, 1,042 games, 465 points, of which 378 are assists.
The Finesse Game
63 shots at a median of 53 feet, 7 per cent from inside twenty and 78 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 44 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 12 shots, 2 goals.
Twelve shots from inside forty feet in forty-six games. He is a puck-mover who has never gone to the net and does not intend to start at thirty-seven.
88.7 mph at the 36th percentile, on thirteen slap shots.
The career line is 87 goals and 378 assists in 1,042 games, which describes the player exactly: he moves it, he does not shoot it.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 173, and 16 penalty minutes.
Top speed 21.4 mph, the 10th percentile; bursts 0.3 a game, the 11th; 2.58 miles a game, the 51st.
He is thirty-seven and small and has never been physical, and none of those three things is going to change. He does not clear a crease and does not finish a check; what he does is retrieve a puck and move it, and he does that as well at thirty-seven as he did at twenty-seven.
He is one of three Minnesota defencemen under 175 pounds.
The Intangibles
Sixty-first overall in 2004 to Pittsburgh, part of the club that won the Stanley Cup there in 2009, and then Dallas, Arizona and Minnesota across sixteen seasons.
51.9 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 57th percentile.
A thousand and forty-two games is the third-longest career in these five chapters. What is left of it is a third pair and a second power-play unit, and the six points last season are what that looks like when the club around it cannot finish.
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.
“He does not clear a crease and does not finish a check; what he does is retrieve a puck and move it, and he does that as well at thirty-seven as he did at twenty-seven.”
“He does not clear a crease and does not finish a check; what he does is retrieve a puck and move it, and he does that as well at thirty-seven as he did at twenty-seven.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 715 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.5%
- 63rd pct
- Shot attempts
- 51.7%
- 68th 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: 21 for, 33 against. Expected: 31.8 and 30.0.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 43 points above where the report does. 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. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.
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 — 59 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 · 46 games
- Top speed
- 21.4 mph
- 41st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.28 a game
- Distance
- 2.58 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.7 mph
- 33rd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
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 · 715 minutes at five-on-five
- Jon Merrill16%
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
- MIN took 50.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.5% — 1.5 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 715 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Dumba | 53.4% | 49.6% | 48.1% |
| Mats Zuccarello | 50.5% | 52.0% | 52.2% |
| Matt Boldy | 54.9% | 50.2% | 52.9% |
53.4% together, 49.6% for him apart and 48.1% for Dumba apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
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
67 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 7% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 78% from beyond forty.