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

Anthony Cirelli

The 20th percentile of zone starts, a 61st-percentile chance share, and eleven career shorthanded goals.

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	TBL	58	11	18	29	+13	33	1	2	1	111	9.9	16:34
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	352	77	111	188	+92	183	6	11	16	594	13.0	16:54

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

11 goals and 18 assists in 58 games — 29 points — at 16:34 a night. Plus-13, 111 shots at 9.9 per cent, one on the power play, two shorthanded, 33 penalty minutes.

Fifty-eight games. He has played seventy or more in three of his six seasons.

51.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 753 minutes, the 61st percentile, with his ice at 35-22 against an expectation of 34.95-32.34 — exactly the goals the chances predicted at the good end and ten fewer than they predicted at the other.

He started 42.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 20th percentile: 212 attacking draws against 282 defensive ones. That is the fourth-hardest deployment given to any Tampa Bay forward, and a 61st-percentile chance share out of it is the best two-way line among the club’s top nine.

The Finesse Game

111 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 54 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 60 shots on goal and ten goals — 16.67 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 35 shots and one goal, 2.86 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 13 shots and none.

Ten of his eleven goals came from inside twenty feet. A 9.9 per cent shooting percentage against a career 13.0 across 594 shots, which is about three goals of shortfall on this volume.

155 tracked attempts, seven of them slap shots, 31 tip-ins — a 20.0 per cent share — and 18 backhands. That is a checking centre’s shot chart: everything is generated at the net front or below the goal line.

86.8 mph at the 21st percentile. The shot has never been part of the job.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 193 pounds, with 1.8 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 81st percentile at a top speed of 22.6 mph, the 66th, on 2.49 miles a game at the 41st.

A quick, hard-working line on sixteen minutes a night, which is what a defensive centre’s tracking data looks like when he is doing the job properly.

33 penalty minutes in 58 games and 183 in 352 career games. He is physical without being nasty: he finishes checks on the forecheck and does not go looking afterwards.

He takes the defensive-zone draws and kills the penalty, and eleven career shorthanded goals in 352 games is one of the highest rates in this book for a forward who has never scored twenty in a season.

The Intangibles

Seventy-second overall in 2015, the third round, six seasons, 352 games, 188 points, all of them here, and two Stanley Cups.

77 goals and a plus-92, which for a forward given the hard end of the rink every night is the number that describes him.

He is twenty-six, and the file has been the same for five years: sixteen minutes, the second-hardest starts on a very good club, a positive chance share out of them, and between 20 and 40 points.

That is a genuinely valuable player and one whose counting line will never say so.

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

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.

slot-man· shoots from where goals are scored
66.4% of his attempts in the slot, 91st percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.69) · 44% keep it
faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“He takes the defensive-zone draws and kills the penalty, and eleven career shorthanded goals in 352 games is one of the highest rates in this book for a forward who has never scored twenty in a season.”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He is physical without being nasty: he finishes checks on the forecheck and does not go looking afterwards.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 753 minutes

Expected goals: 51.9%; 66th pct
Shot attempts: 50.8%; 60th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 35 for, 22 against. Expected: 35.0 and 32.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

92nd

Numbers

66th

The report ranks him 26 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 — 78 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 · 58 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 71st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.76 a game
Distance: 2.49 miles a game
Hardest shot: 86.8 mph; 47th 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 · 753 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: TBL took 51.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.9% — 0.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 753 minutes at five-on-five — 35th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Alex Killorn	50.7%	54.4%	47.2%
Ian Cole	54.0%	50.4%	53.1%
Erik Cernak	57.1%	48.5%	50.3%

50.7% together, 54.4% for him apart and 47.2% for Killorn apart. He was carrying it: the share stayed with him and left Killorn behind.

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

152 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 57% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 11% from beyond forty.