This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Alexander Alexeyev
Washington Capitals Defense
A first-round pick with thirty-three NHL games and no goals in any of them.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | WSH | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 10:35 |
| 2022-23 | WSH | 32 | 0 | 5 | 5 | -2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 28 | 0.0 | 16:27 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 33 | 0 | 5 | 5 | -2 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 28 | 0.0 | 16:16 |
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
No goals and 5 assists in 32 games — 5 points — at 16:27 a night. Minus-2, 28 shots and no goals, 4 penalty minutes.
43.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 9th percentile, across 487 minutes, with his ice at 20-23 against an expectation of 15.92-20.58.
He started 35.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 7th percentile: 86 attacking draws against 156 defensive ones — hard minutes for a rookie on a third pair.
Four hundred and eighty-seven minutes is a third of a season, and a 9th-percentile chance share out of the seventh percentile of starts is a defensible outcome rather than a good one.
The Finesse Game
28 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 61 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.
Beyond forty feet: 20 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: four shots and none. Inside twenty: three shots and none.
Twenty-seven shots on goal and no goals, in either of his two NHL seasons: he has 28 career shots and has not scored.
51 tracked attempts, eight of them slap shots, and a shot measured at 91.3 mph, the 53rd percentile.
Five assists in 33 career games. There is no offensive record here at all, and for a first-round pick who was drafted for his skating and his passing, that is the problem stated in one line.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 230 pounds, with 4 penalty minutes in 32 games and 6 in 33 career games — an extraordinarily low figure for a defenceman of that size taking those starts.
Top speed 21.7 mph at the 20th percentile, 0.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 15th, 2.30 miles a game at the 32nd. Slow on every measure.
He defends by position and by taking away the ice in front of him, which at 6-4 works well enough on a third pair.
He is not punishing, and the four penalty minutes in thirty-two games are the number that most surprises a reader who has seen the size.
The feet are the ceiling, and the tracking says he is well below average for a defenceman his age.
The Intangibles
Thirty-first overall in 2018, two seasons, 33 games, 5 points, all of them here.
No goals, five assists, and a minus-2.
He is twenty-three, a Russian first-round pick five years past the draft with thirty-three NHL games.
That is a first-round pick who has not happened yet, and the honest projection from 487 minutes is a seventh defenceman. The size is real and the rest of it is unproven in either direction.
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.
- hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
36% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 4th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
“He defends by position and by taking away the ice in front of him, which at 6-4 works well enough on a third pair.”
“He is not punishing, and the four penalty minutes in thirty-two games are the number that most surprises a reader who has seen the size.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 487 minutes
- Expected goals
- 43.6%
- 13th pct
- Shot attempts
- 44.6%
- 15th 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: 20 for, 23 against. Expected: 15.9 and 20.6.
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 — 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 · 32 games
- Top speed
- 21.7 mph
- 54th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.34 a game
- Distance
- 2.30 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 91.3 mph
- 46th 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 · 487 minutes at five-on-five
- Matt Irwinoff the roster33%
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
- WSH took 49.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.6% — 5.7 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 487 minutes at five-on-five — 15th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Irwin | 43.1% | 43.9% | 46.9% |
| Dylan Strome | 44.6% | 43.2% | 51.3% |
| Evgeny Kuznetsov | 40.5% | 44.7% | 44.7% |
43.1% together, 43.9% for him apart and 46.9% for Irwin apart. Irwin was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more than for him.
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
50 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 0 of them goals. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 74% from beyond forty.