This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Brett Leason
Anaheim Ducks Right Wing
Six-foot-five, 23, and a first NHL season of 36 games at 8:57 a night that produced three goals and the best chance share on the fourth line in Washington.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | WSH | 36 | 3 | 3 | 6 | +1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 45 | 6.7 | 8:57 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 36 | 3 | 3 | 6 | +1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 45 | 6.7 | 8:57 |
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
With Washington. 3 goals and 3 assists in 36 games — 6 points at 8:57 a night, plus-1, on 45 shots and 4 penalty minutes.
Eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds a night is a thirteenth forward’s ice time and 36 games is the whole of his NHL career.
54.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 330 minutes. His ice went 9-9 against an expectation of 12.19-10.13 — three goals of scoring that the chances said should have arrived and did not. On a good Washington club that is a perfectly respectable number, and it was not earned in easy circumstances: he started 41.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking end, the 14th percentile, which is the deployment of a fourth-liner and not of a protected rookie.
43.3 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the offensive zone, which is the deployment a fourth-liner gets when the coach wants nothing complicated to happen.
The Finesse Game
45 attempts and 33 per cent of his attempts came from inside 20 feet, at a median of 32 — a mixed chart with a third of it from beyond 40. He converted at 6.7 per cent.
87.3 mph on the shot, which for a 6-5 winger is soft, and 6 points in 36 games says the hands have not yet made anything happen at this level. He was a nineteen-year-old scoring 89 points in the WHL and none of that has travelled so far.
The Physical Game
6-5 and 220 is the reason he is on an NHL roster at 23, and 4 penalty minutes in 36 games says he has not yet worked out what to do with it. That is the whole development question: a man this size who is not hard to play against is not a fourth-line winger, he is a large passenger.
The tracking gives a 22.1 mph top speed and a real burst rate for a man his size. The ground-covered figure reads at the bottom of the league and should be ignored — it is a per-game measure and he played nine minutes a night.
The Intangibles
Fifty-sixth overall in 2019 by Washington, a twice-passed-over draft eligible who went in the second round at twenty after a 89-point season in Prince Albert.
He is 23, arriving in Anaheim from an organisation that had no room for him, at a club that has room for almost anybody. A 6-5 winger with three NHL goals is a lottery ticket and this is the year it either does something or does not — and a rebuilding roster is the one place where a player gets enough shifts for the question to be answered honestly.
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.
- 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.
“33 per cent of his attempts came from inside 20 feet, at a median of 32”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 330 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.6%
- 84th pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.7%
- 76th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 9 for, 9 against. Expected: 12.2 and 10.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 71 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 52 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 · 36 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 50th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.61 a game
- Distance
- 1.49 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.3 mph
- 51st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.1
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 with WSH · 330 minutes at five-on-five
- Carl Hagelinoff the roster42%
- Nic Dowd24%
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
- WSH took 51.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.6% — 3.5 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 330 minutes at five-on-five — 9th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carl Hagelin | 53.0% | 55.5% | 50.5% |
| Martin Fehervary | 64.4% | 50.4% | 47.4% |
| Nick Jensen | 50.7% | 56.5% | 51.0% |
53.0% together, 55.5% for him apart and 50.5% for Hagelin 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
52 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 33% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 37% from beyond forty.