This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Alexandre Carrier

One hundred and seventy-four pounds and the fourth percentile in top speed, playing eighteen minutes a night.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2016-17	NSH	2	0	0	0	+1	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	10:24
2019-20	NSH	3	0	0	0	+2	2	0	0	0	4	0.0	10:47
2020-21	NSH	19	1	2	3	+3	8	0	0	0	31	3.2	20:03
2021-22	NSH	77	3	27	30	+26	50	1	0	0	95	3.2	20:59
2022-23	NSH	43	2	7	9	0	27	0	0	1	48	4.2	17:53
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	144	6	36	42	+32	87	1	0	1	179	3.4	19:35

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 7 assists in 43 games — 9 points — at 17:53 a night. Even, 48 shots, 27 penalty minutes.

50.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 55th percentile — the best figure of any Nashville defenceman — with his ice at 20-25 against an expectation of 27.14-26.76 across 648 minutes. Seven goals short at the offensive end.

He started 43.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 21st percentile, which is the second-hardest share on the blue line.

He played 77 games in 2021-22 and 43 in this one.

Five seasons, 144 games, 42 points, all of them in Nashville.

The Finesse Game

48 shots at a median of 47 feet, 12 per cent from inside twenty and 63 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 28 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 20 shots, 2 goals.

Forty-eight shots in forty-three games is a low volume and six goals in 144 career games is the record. There is no offensive dimension and Nashville does not use him on the power play.

88.7 mph at the 36th percentile, on ten slap shots.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 174 — the fifth-lightest defenceman in this book, behind Spurgeon, Girard, Goligoski and Addison.

Top speed 21.0 mph, the 4th percentile. Bursts 0.3 a game, the 11th; 2.50 miles a game, the 43rd.

A 174-pound defenceman at the 4th percentile in top speed is a difficult combination to survive on, and the fact that he does it at eighteen minutes a night with a 55th-percentile chance share is the most interesting thing about him.

He cannot clear a crease and does not try. What he does is take the inside lane early and use the stick, and the 27 penalty minutes in 43 games say he is late often enough for it to cost.

The Intangibles

One hundred and fifteenth overall in 2015 out of Gatineau, five seasons in the organisation, and a full-time job at twenty-five.

This book’s sympathies are with the small defenceman who wins by position, and Carrier is a real if minor example of the type: a fourth-rounder at 174 pounds holding a top-four job on merit.

The reservation is the games played and the speed, and neither is going to improve.

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.

edgesa strength· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“What he does is take the inside lane early and use the stick, and the 27 penalty minutes in 43 games say he is late often enough for it to cost.”
clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He cannot clear a crease and does not try.”
fouls-when-beatena strength· the stick foul that follows losing a step
“What he does is take the inside lane early and use the stick, and the 27 penalty minutes in 43 games say he is late often enough for it to cost.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 648 minutes

Expected goals: 50.3%; 55th pct
Shot attempts: 49%; 45th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 20 for, 25 against. Expected: 27.1 and 26.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

20th

Numbers

55th

The numbers rank him 35 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 · 43 games

Top speed: 21.0 mph; 28th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.28 a game
Distance: 2.50 miles a game
Hardest shot: 88.7 mph; 33rd pct

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 · 648 minutes at five-on-five

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: NSH took 47.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.3% — 3.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 648 minutes at five-on-five — 26th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Mattias Ekholm	54.6%	42.3%	56.5%
Mikael Granlund	49.3%	50.8%	47.4%
Nino Niederreiter	50.3%	50.4%	53.5%

54.6% together, 42.3% for him apart and 56.5% for Ekholm apart. He was worse away from Ekholm, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Ekholm did.

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 28 feet. 12% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 63% from beyond forty.