This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Alexey Toropchenko
St. Louis Blues Right Wing
Six-foot-six at the 95th percentile of top speed, which almost nobody in this book manages.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | STL | 28 | 2 | 0 | 2 | -9 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 43 | 4.7 | 10:43 |
| 2022-23 | STL | 69 | 10 | 9 | 19 | +6 | 12 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 86 | 11.6 | 12:05 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 97 | 12 | 9 | 21 | -3 | 27 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 129 | 9.3 | 11:41 |
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
10 goals and 9 assists in 69 games — 19 points — at 12:05 a night. Plus-6, 86 shots at 11.6 per cent, one shorthanded, 12 penalty minutes.
It was his first full NHL season; he had played 28 games before it.
45.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 749 minutes, the 16th percentile, with his ice at 28-22 against an expectation of 23.98-29.11 — four goals better than the chances at the good end and seven better at the other.
He started 43.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 23rd percentile.
An eleven-goal swing in his favour on 749 minutes, on the club that finished second in the league in finishing. The plus-6 is not his.
The Finesse Game
86 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 55 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.
Inside twenty feet: 41 shots on goal and five goals — 12.20 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 28 shots and two goals, 7.14 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 13 shots and three goals, 23.08 per cent.
Three goals from thirteen shots beyond forty feet is the sort of number this book has spent five chapters explaining away in the other direction, and it should be read the same way here: on thirteen shots it is noise.
Below the rate from the two bands that carry his volume, on a 11.6 per cent shooting percentage against a career 9.3.
103 tracked attempts, four of them slap shots and 18 backhands — a 17.5 per cent share, with eleven tip-ins and six deflections. That is the shot chart of a big winger playing below the goal line.
89.9 mph at the 43rd percentile.
The Physical Game
6-6 and 225 pounds, with a top speed of 23.3 mph at the 95th percentile and 2.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 89th. He covers 1.96 miles a game at the 14th, which is twelve minutes of ice time rather than a lack of work.
That combination is genuinely rare. Of the twenty skaters in this book listed at 6-6 or taller, he has the highest measured top speed — a tenth of a mile an hour clear of Nick Bjugstad and half a mile clear of Victor Hedman.
He forechecks first man at full speed at 225 pounds, which is the single most valuable thing in this file and the reason a fourth-line winger who scored ten goals is worth reading about.
12 penalty minutes in 69 games and 27 in 97 career games — a very low rate for a man playing that way, and it says the contact is well-timed rather than desperate.
The Intangibles
A hundred and thirteenth overall in 2017, the fourth round, two seasons, 97 games, 21 points, all of them here.
Twelve career goals. There is not much of a record yet and what there is comes from one season.
He is twenty-four, on a rebuilding club with room in the bottom six for years. The 16th-percentile chance share is the concern and the tracking line is the reason to be patient with it.
What a 6-6 winger who skates at the 95th percentile becomes is a question worth two more seasons of the answer.
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.
“He forechecks first man at full speed at 225 pounds, which is the single most valuable thing in this file and the reason a fourth-line winger who scored ten goals is worth reading about.”
“12 penalty minutes in 69 games and 27 in 97 career games — a very low rate for a man playing that way, and it says the contact is well-timed rather than desperate.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 749 minutes
- Expected goals
- 45.2%
- 22nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 43.8%
- 11th 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: 28 for, 22 against. Expected: 24.0 and 29.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 56 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 — 72 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 · 69 games
- Top speed
- 23.3 mph
- 96th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.23 a game
- Distance
- 1.96 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.9 mph
- 66th 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 · 749 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
- STL took 45.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 45.2% — 0.6 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 749 minutes at five-on-five — 34th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tyler Pitlick | 48.2% | 42.1% | 39.6% |
| Nathan Walker | 46.3% | 44.5% | 30.6% |
| Justin Faulk | 41.1% | 47.3% | 44.1% |
48.2% together, 42.1% for him apart and 39.6% for Pitlick 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
99 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 31 feet. 55% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.