This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Brent Burns

82 games at 40 years old, which nobody else in the league can say, on a one-year deal to be the third-pair right shot.

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

2003-04	MIN	36	1	5	6	-10	12	0	0	0	34	2.9	13:29
2005-06	MIN	72	4	12	16	-7	32	1	0	1	73	5.5	14:07
2006-07	MIN	77	7	18	25	+16	26	3	0	3	108	6.5	15:48
2007-08	MIN	82	15	28	43	+12	80	8	0	4	158	9.5	23:06
2008-09	MIN	59	8	19	27	-7	45	4	0	2	147	5.4	22:25
2009-10	MIN	47	3	17	20	-15	32	2	0	0	104	2.9	22:22
2010-11	MIN	80	17	29	46	-10	98	8	0	3	170	10.0	25:03
2011-12	SJS	81	11	26	37	+8	34	5	0	2	201	5.5	22:32
2012-13	SJS	30	9	11	20	0	20	2	0	0	81	11.1	16:17
2013-14	SJS	69	22	26	48	+26	34	2	0	3	245	9.0	16:49
2014-15	SJS	82	17	43	60	-9	65	7	0	2	245	6.9	23:57
2015-16	SJS	82	27	48	75	-5	53	7	1	4	353	7.6	25:52
2016-17	SJS	82	29	47	76	+19	40	8	0	6	320	9.1	24:52
2017-18	SJS	82	12	55	67	-16	46	5	0	2	332	3.6	25:15
2018-19	SJS	82	16	67	83	+13	34	7	1	6	300	5.3	25:06
2019-20	SJS	70	12	33	45	-22	34	5	0	1	225	5.3	25:25
2020-21	SJS	56	7	22	29	-13	36	2	0	1	138	5.1	26:09
2021-22	SJS	82	10	44	54	-15	42	4	0	0	203	4.9	26:09
2022-23	CAR	82	18	43	61	+19	44	4	0	2	255	7.1	23:13
2023-24	CAR	82	10	33	43	+19	20	4	1	0	185	5.4	21:30
2024-25	CAR	82	6	23	29	+7	28	0	0	0	174	3.5	20:57
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	1497	261	649	910	+10	855	88	3	42	4051	6.4	22:22

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

6 goals and 23 assists in 82 games for 29 points with Carolina, plus-7, on 20:57 a night. 174 shots.

82 games at 40 is the line worth stopping on. He has not missed a regular-season game in more than a decade, and there is no second example of that anywhere in the league at any age.

The Finesse Game

The shot is still the shot. A heavy point release he gets through traffic, and a willingness to walk the line for a better angle rather than firing into a shin pad. 174 shots from the blue line is a man who is still a genuine option on a power play.

The puck decisions have got simpler, which is the correct adjustment and not everyone makes it. He moves it early now, takes the safe side of a read, and has stopped trying to be the man who beats a forechecker one-on-one. The first pass is fine. The second option, when the first is covered, is where the age shows.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 228, and he ends plays with reach and weight rather than by chasing hits — a stick in a lane, a body between a man and the net. He can still clear a crease, which is not nothing on a blue line where the two best players cannot.

What has gone is the skating. He is beaten wide by real speed and he cannot recover the way he could, which is the entire reason a former Norris winner is a third-pair signing at 40.

The Intangibles

The iron man of his era, and a man whose durability is not luck: he has played this way for 20 years and never taken a shift off or a season easy.

Colorado is not buying the player he was. It is buying 20 minutes a night from a right shot who will be available in April, on a blue line whose top four is small, one of whom misses games every year. That is a sensible thing to buy, and it will look bad the first night somebody skates around him.

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
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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.

perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
86.0% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 96th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He can still clear a crease, which is not nothing on a blue line where the two best players cannot.”
defends-with-reacha strength· takes the puck before the contact happens
“he ends plays with reach and weight rather than by chasing hits — a stick in a lane, a body between a man and the net.”
transitionpresent and ordinary· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He moves it early now, takes the safe side of a read, and has stopped trying to be the man who beats a forechecker one-on-one.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,276 minutes

Expected goals: 54.4%; 88th pct
Shot attempts: 57.7%; 96th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 57 for, 56 against. Expected: 61.5 and 51.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

66th

Numbers

88th

The numbers rank him 22 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 75 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, 2024-25 · 82 games

Top speed: 21.7 mph; 54th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.34 a game
Distance: 3.00 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.6 mph; 67th 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

2024-25 with CAR · 1276 minutes at five-on-five

Jaccob Slavin89%

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, 2024-25

The club: CAR took 55.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.4% — 1.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,276 minutes at five-on-five — 90th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jaccob Slavin	56.5%	39.9%	51.3%
Jordan Martinook	56.0%	53.6%	56.8%
Jordan Staal	53.7%	54.8%	58.2%

56.5% together, 39.9% for him apart and 51.3% for Slavin apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

271 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 51 feet. 3% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 86% from beyond forty.