This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Anthony Cirelli
Tampa Bay Lightning Center
A 100.2 mph shot from a checking centre with the 4th-hardest chair on the club.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | TBL | 18 | 5 | 6 | 11 | +11 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 26 | 19.2 | 13:14 |
| 2018-19 | TBL | 82 | 19 | 20 | 39 | +25 | 34 | 0 | 5 | 5 | 123 | 15.4 | 14:51 |
| 2019-20 | TBL | 68 | 16 | 28 | 44 | +28 | 30 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 113 | 14.2 | 18:27 |
| 2020-21 | TBL | 50 | 9 | 13 | 22 | 0 | 10 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 75 | 12.0 | 17:45 |
| 2021-22 | TBL | 76 | 17 | 26 | 43 | +15 | 70 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 146 | 11.6 | 18:19 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 294 | 66 | 93 | 159 | +79 | 150 | 5 | 9 | 15 | 483 | 13.7 | 16:58 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
76 games, 17 goals and 26 assists at 18:19 a night, plus-15, seventy penalty minutes, 146 shots. Three of the seventeen came on the power play and one short-handed. Seventy-second overall in 2015 by Tampa Bay — the third round — five seasons, 294 games, 159 points.
The Finesse Game
He started 44.6 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end — 302 against 375 — and came out at 54.5 per cent of the expected goals.
That is the 81st percentile among the 393 forwards who played forty games, out of the 168th-lowest chair of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts. A top-quarter chance share out of a bottom-third deployment is the most valuable thing a third-line centre can do.
6.29 shots per 60 is the 31st percentile at 11.6 per cent, from a 22-foot median with fifty-six per cent from the slot. 1.82 even-strength points per 60 is the 51st percentile — the offence is ordinary and the rest of the file is not.
2.59 takeaways per 60 is the 96th percentile. His ice went 45-38 against an expectation of 46.81-39.05, which is close to level in both directions across seventy-six games.
The Physical Game
Seventy penalty minutes in seventy-six games at 6-1 and 193 pounds, and 1.03 penalties taken per 60 is the 81st percentile against 1.77 drawn at the 96th — he is among the fifteen most-fouled forwards in the league and the net is strongly positive.
3.23 hits per 60 is the 40th percentile and 2.89 blocks the 91st.
The Intangibles
2:06 a night short-handed is the 94th percentile among forwards, on a club that finished 8th in the league in expected goals against per 60 on the kill.
His shot is 100.2 mph, the 6th-hardest of the 365 forwards the tracking measures — harder than Steven Stamkos’s and harder than Nikita Kucherov’s, from a man who took seventeen goals out of it.
22.7 mph is the 69th percentile and 7.3 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 the 71st, against 8.82 miles per 60 — the 11th-least of the 365 forwards the tracking covers.
Alex Killorn covers the 2nd-least, Steven Stamkos the 9th and Cirelli the 11th. Three of the eleven forwards who cover the least ground per minute of the 365 the tracking covers are on this roster, which is a club-level fact rather than a personal one.
He is 25, with 159 points in 294 games. The chair, the chance share out of it, the kill and the shot velocity are four things a contender pays for and three of them do not show up on a scoresheet. Forty-three points is the ceiling as the record stands, and nothing here suggests the offence is the part still developing.
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.
“2:06 a night short-handed is the 94th percentile among forwards, on a club that finished 8th in the league in expected goals against per 60 on the kill.”
“He started 44.6 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end — 302 against 375 — and came out at 54.5 per cent of the expected goals.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 1,068 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.5%
- 84th pct
- Shot attempts
- 53.6%
- 81st 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: 45 for, 38 against. Expected: 46.8 and 39.0.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 13 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 76 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, 2021-22 · 76 games
- Top speed
- 22.7 mph
- 79th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.22 a game
- Distance
- 2.69 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 100.2 mph
- 99th 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 84.1
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
2021-22 · 1068 minutes at five-on-five
- Alex Killorn59%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- TBL took 52.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.5% — 2.0 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First line, 1,068 minutes at five-on-five — 71st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alex Killorn | 53.4% | 55.9% | 44.6% |
| Victor Hedman | 57.6% | 52.1% | 54.6% |
| Ryan McDonagh | 51.7% | 55.9% | 48.9% |
53.4% together, 55.9% for him apart and 44.6% for Killorn apart. Killorn was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Killorn 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
198 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 17 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 46% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 12% from beyond forty.