This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Bowen Byram

Seventeen points in 30 games at twenty, and a top speed at the 96th percentile among defencemen.

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

2020-21	COL	19	0	2	2	+1	23	0	0	0	21	0.0	17:31
2021-22	COL	30	5	12	17	+7	12	1	0	2	49	10.2	18:48
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	49	5	14	19	+8	35	1	0	2	70	7.1	18:18

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

5 goals and 12 assists in 30 games — 17 points at 18:48 a night, plus-7, with 12 penalty minutes.

53.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 516 minutes. His ice went 28-22 against an expectation of 22.66-19.77 — five more goals for than the chances promised and two more against.

Five hundred and sixteen minutes across 30 games, which clears this book’s minutes threshold but not its games one, so no percentiles are quoted against the position.

The Finesse Game

Forty-nine shots and five goals at 10.2 per cent, from a median of 42 feet with 13 per cent from the slot. Seventeen points in 30 games is a fifty-point pace from a twenty-year-old defenceman.

1:03 a night on the power play on a club whose first unit belongs to Cale Makar, and 16 points of the 17 came at even strength or on the second unit.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 205. 23.4 mph is the 96th percentile among defencemen — on a blue line that already has the two fastest defencemen in the league, he is the third.

2.83 miles a game and 1.6 bursts over 20 mph a game are a thirty-game player’s figures and should be read as such: a top speed is a season best, and thirty games is a third of the chances at one.

The Intangibles

Fourth overall in 2019, and 49 NHL games at 21 with a career plus-8.

He played 30 games last season and 19 the year before, and Colorado won a Stanley Cup with him in and out of the lineup. What the repo cannot see is why the games are missing, which is the single fact that decides whether this is a top-pair defenceman or a cautionary tale, and it is not in any of the data here.

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.

edgesa strength· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“23.4 mph is the 96th percentile among defencemen”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 516 minutes

Expected goals: 53.4%; 79th pct
Shot attempts: 53.3%; 80th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 28 for, 22 against. Expected: 22.7 and 19.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

74th

Numbers

79th

The two rank him within 5 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 — 66 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 · 30 games

Top speed: 23.4 mph; 99th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.63 a game
Distance: 2.83 miles a game
Hardest shot: 88.0 mph; 27th 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

2021-22 · 516 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, 2021-22

The club: COL took 51.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.4% — 1.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 516 minutes at five-on-five — 20th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nathan MacKinnon	54.4%	52.8%	52.0%
Cale Makar	67.0%	47.5%	55.3%
Andre Burakovsky	50.4%	54.6%	53.8%

54.4% together, 52.8% for him apart and 52.0% for MacKinnon apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

71 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 33 feet. 13% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 56% from beyond forty.