Alexander Barabanov
San Jose Sharks Left Wing
Undrafted out of Russia, forty-seven points, and thirty-eight tip-ins from a hundred and sixty-eight attempts.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | TOR/SJS | 22 | 3 | 5 | 8 | +1 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 23 | 13.0 | 12:19 |
| 2021-22 | SJS | 70 | 10 | 29 | 39 | -5 | 14 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 103 | 9.7 | 17:11 |
| 2022-23 | SJS | 68 | 15 | 32 | 47 | -30 | 20 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 120 | 12.5 | 18:03 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 160 | 28 | 66 | 94 | -34 | 40 | 6 | 0 | 4 | 246 | 11.4 | 16:53 |
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
15 goals and 32 assists in 68 games — 47 points — at 18:03 a night. Minus-30, 120 shots at 12.5 per cent, three on the power play, two game-winners, 20 penalty minutes.
Forty-seven points in 68 games is a career best by eight and the third-highest total on the club.
48.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 981 minutes, the 34th percentile, with his ice at 48-59 against an expectation of 42.50-44.35 — fifteen goals conceded above the expectation, which is the goaltending again.
He started 46.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 31st percentile.
The Finesse Game
120 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 51 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 6 per cent from beyond forty.
Inside twenty feet: 60 shots on goal and 11 goals — 18.33 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 51 shots and four goals, 7.84 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 10 shots and one goal.
Above the rate from close range and below it from the mid-slot, which describes a winger who scores from where he works rather than from where he shoots.
38 of his 168 tracked attempts are tip-ins — 22.6 per cent, the eighth-highest share of the 477 forwards in this book who took a hundred attempts. He plays the net front on a club that had very little else to offer there.
85.5 mph at the 14th percentile. The shot is soft and it does not matter at nineteen feet.
The Physical Game
5-10 and 195 pounds. 2.95 miles a game at the 78th percentile, at a top speed of 21.7 mph at the 20th and 0.7 bursts above twenty a game at the 36th.
A great deal of ground covered from a low top-end speed, which for a small winger playing eighteen minutes a night means he is working rather than skating past people.
20 penalty minutes in 68 games. He goes to the front of the net at 195 pounds and takes the punishment that comes with the tip-in count, which is the physical cost of the way he scores.
He is not a checker and does not finish hits; the contact he takes is all of it incurred while facing the other way.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, and 160 NHL games across three seasons after a career in Russia that this book does not measure.
94 points in those 160 games. He arrived at twenty-six, played 22 games in his first season, and has scored at a second-line rate ever since.
He is twenty-nine on a club that is rebuilding around players ten years younger, which makes him a useful season and probably not a long-term one.
What the file records is a small, late-arriving winger who found the one place on the ice where his size does not cost him anything and has stayed there.
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.
“**Undrafted**, and 160 NHL games across three seasons after a career in Russia that this book does not measure.”
“He goes to the front of the net at 195 pounds and takes the punishment that comes with the tip-in count, which is the physical cost of the way he scores.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 981 minutes
- Expected goals
- 48.9%
- 42nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 49.7%
- 50th 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: 48 for, 59 against. Expected: 42.5 and 44.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 32 points above where the numbers do. 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 — 71 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
- 21.7 mph
- 30th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.69 a game
- Distance
- 2.95 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 85.5 mph
- 39th 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 · 981 minutes at five-on-five
- Tomas Hertl21%
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
- SJS took 48.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.9% — 0.4 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second line, 981 minutes at five-on-five — 56th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logan Couture | 51.5% | 43.0% | 43.7% |
| Erik Karlsson | 49.1% | 48.7% | 52.0% |
| Matt Nieto | 45.2% | 50.6% | 51.4% |
51.5% together, 43.0% for him apart and 43.7% for Couture 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
167 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 16 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 53% of his shots came from inside twenty feet.