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

Ben Meyers

Forty-four NHL games and no assists in any of them.

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

2021-22	COL	5	1	0	1	-2	0	0	0	0	8	12.5	9:57
2022-23	COL	39	4	0	4	-6	6	0	0	0	33	12.1	9:36
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	44	5	0	5	-8	6	0	0	0	41	12.2	9:38

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

4 goals and no assists in 39 games, minus-6, 9:36 a night.

Across two seasons and 44 NHL games he has five goals and zero assists. That is not a small sample producing a strange split; it is a forward who has never registered a point he did not score himself.

54.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 365 minutes, the 84th percentile — the best figure of any Colorado forward outside the top line, and on 365 minutes it is close to meaningless.

The Finesse Game

33 shots at a median of 13 feet and 67 per cent from inside twenty — the tightest distribution of any skater on this roster.

Inside forty: 29 shots, three goals. Beyond forty: 5 shots, one.

He plays where goals are scored and takes 33 shots a season doing it. The finishing is fine; there is simply no volume and no second dimension.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 194. 23.4 mph at the 97th percentile against 1.68 miles a game at the 3rd — very fast, and almost never on the ice.

That is a nine-minute-a-night forward’s line and it should be read as ice time rather than effort. 2.0 bursts a game at the 85th percentile in nine minutes is a high rate of them.

6 penalty minutes in 39 games.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of the University of Minnesota, an Olympian for the United States in 2022, and signed by Colorado straight out of Beijing.

He is 24, has 44 games and no assists. The skating is genuinely NHL-grade and everything else has to arrive quickly.

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.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, out of the University of Minnesota, an Olympian for the United States in 2022, and signed by Colorado straight out of Beijing.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“it is a forward who has never registered a point he did not score himself”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 365 minutes

Expected goals: 54.5%; 84th pct
Shot attempts: 51%; 61st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 9 for, 15 against. Expected: 14.0 and 11.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

4th

Numbers

84th

The numbers rank him 80 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 — 51 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 · 39 games

Top speed: 23.4 mph; 97th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.97 a game
Distance: 1.68 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.8 mph; 53rd 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 · 365 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: COL 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: Fourth line, 365 minutes at five-on-five — 9th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Samuel Girard	52.6%	55.7%	52.2%
Erik Johnson	44.2%	59.4%	48.7%
Logan O'Connor	47.8%	57.8%	49.3%

52.6% together, 55.7% for him apart and 52.2% for Girard apart. He was better away from Girard, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Girard.

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

48 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 67% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 10% from beyond forty.