This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Brandon Carlo

Twenty-eight goals in 554 games, the worst chance share of the top four, and nineteen goals of margin on his ice.

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

2016-17	BOS	82	6	10	16	+9	59	0	1	0	88	6.8	20:49
2017-18	BOS	76	0	6	6	+10	45	0	0	0	76	0.0	19:14
2018-19	BOS	72	2	8	10	+22	47	0	0	0	116	1.7	20:55
2019-20	BOS	67	4	15	19	+16	33	0	0	0	111	3.6	20:29
2020-21	BOS	27	3	1	4	+1	12	0	0	1	43	7.0	18:43
2021-22	BOS	79	6	9	15	+2	31	0	1	0	125	4.8	19:42
2022-23	BOS	75	3	13	16	+44	38	0	0	0	94	3.2	18:50
2023-24	BOS	76	4	10	14	+23	42	0	0	1	79	5.1	19:54
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	554	28	72	100	+127	307	0	2	2	732	3.8	19:55

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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 10 assists in 76 games — 14 points at 19:54 a night, plus-23, on 79 shots with 42 penalty minutes.

46.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,258 minutes, the 27th percentile — the worst mark of the top four defencemen. His ice went 56-38 against an expectation of 45.23-52.87 — eleven goals scored above expectation and eight fewer conceded, nineteen goals of margin against a chance share that says he was underwater all year.

That gap is the whole club’s season in one man’s ledger, and it is not his.

The Finesse Game

79 attempts at a median of 54 feet, with 77 per cent from beyond 40 and 6 per cent from inside 20, converting at 5.06 per cent. Twenty-eight goals in 554 NHL games.

Ten assists. He does not carry the puck out and he does not create anything — the first pass is short, safe and off the glass when it needs to be, and the club asks for nothing else.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 227, and this is the report. He defends the rush with reach almost nobody gets around — the stick arrives before the body does and the puck carrier runs out of ice on the outside.

He blocks shots as a matter of course and he clears the front of his own net. 42 penalty minutes in 76 games and 307 in 554 for his career is a clean rate for a man who defends this way, because he is very rarely beaten to the place where a foul is the only option left.

The Intangibles

Thirty-seventh overall in 2015 and 554 games, all of them here, with a career plus-127 and a hundred points.

He is 27. A defenceman whose entire value is that the man in front of him does not get to shoot will always look worse in the chance columns than he is, and the concussion history is the reason a career this long has never included a full 82.

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
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.

hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
23% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 0th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
defends-with-reacha strength· takes the puck before the contact happens
“**He defends the rush with reach almost nobody gets around** — the stick arrives before the body does and the puck carrier runs out of ice on the outside.”
shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it
“**He blocks shots as a matter of course and he clears the front of his own net.**”
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“**He blocks shots as a matter of course and he clears the front of his own net.**”
defensively-responsiblea strength· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“**A defenceman whose entire value is that the man in front of him does not get to shoot will always look worse in the chance columns than he is**, and the concussion history is the reason a career this long has never included a full 82.”
transitionhe lacks it· carries it out; gains the line under control
“**He does not carry the puck out and he does not create anything** — the first pass is short, safe and off the glass when it needs to be, and the club asks for nothing else.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“**He does not carry the puck out and he does not create anything** — the first pass is short, safe and off the glass when it needs to be, and the club asks for nothing else.”
fouls-when-beatenhe lacks it· the stick foul that follows losing a step
“42 penalty minutes in 76 games and 307 in 554 for his career is a clean rate for a man who defends this way, because he is very rarely beaten to the place where a foul is the only option left.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 1,258 minutes

Expected goals: 46.1%; 27th pct
Shot attempts: 43.3%; 9th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 56 for, 38 against. Expected: 45.2 and 52.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

24th

Numbers

27th

The two rank him within 3 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 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, 2023-24 · 76 games

Top speed: 21.9 mph; 59th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.41 a game
Distance: 2.67 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.6 mph; 69th 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

2023-24 · 1258 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, 2023-24

The club: BOS took 49.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.1% — 3.6 below the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,258 minutes at five-on-five — 87th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Hampus Lindholm	49.6%	41.6%	53.5%
Charlie Coyle	43.8%	47.3%	49.4%
Brad Marchand	45.6%	46.3%	52.1%

49.6% together, 41.6% for him apart and 53.5% for Lindholm apart. He was the one being carried: the share went with Lindholm and did not follow 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

119 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 57 feet. 6% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 77% from beyond forty.