Armchair Hockey Scout Beta

This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

17

Brett Leason

Anaheim Ducks Right Wing

Six-foot-five, and the worst five-on-five share of anybody who played fifty games.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22WSH36336+14000456.78:57
2022-23ANA54639-21140015111.810:54
2023-24 so far
Career909615-2018001969.410:07

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

6 goals and 3 assists in 54 games — 9 points at 10:54 a night, minus-21, on 51 shots, converting at 11.76 per cent, and 14 penalty minutes.

35.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 580 minutes — the 0th percentile in the league. He started 35.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking end, also the 0th percentile, so the deployment explains part of it and not all of it: his ice went 13-35 against an expectation of 18.24-33.66.

The Finesse Game

51 attempts at a median of 26 feet, 35 per cent from inside 20, off an 85.1 mph shot at the 12th percentile. Fifteen points in 90 career NHL games.

There is no established offensive skill to describe yet. He was a nineteen-year-old junior scorer who was passed over in two drafts before Washington took him, and the scoring has not travelled.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 220, and the size is the reason he is here. He is not yet using it — 14 penalty minutes in 54 games, and he covers 1.73 miles a game at the 5th percentile, which is a player having short shifts and not finishing many of them hard.

The foot speed is adequate at 22.2 mph, the 47th percentile. For a man this size that is enough, and the question is whether the compete arrives to go with it.

The Intangibles

Fifty-sixth overall in 2019, at twenty, after going undrafted in his first two years of eligibility — a late-blooming junior scorer Washington gambled a second-round pick on.

He is 24 and out of the age bracket where potential is the answer. This is a club with nothing to lose by playing him, which makes it the fairest test he will get: two hundred games here will settle whether there is an NHL player in the frame.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 580 minutes

Expected goals
35.1%
0th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
38.8%
1st pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 13 for, 35 against. Expected: 18.2 and 33.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
4th
Numbers
0th

The two rank him within 4 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 58 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 50 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 580 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
ANA took 39.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 35.1% — 4.6 below the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 580 minutes at five-on-five — 21st percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Mason McTavish41.6%29.6%41.8%
Max Jones38.3%33.2%41.0%
Cam Fowler31.4%37.3%43.7%

41.6% together, 29.6% for him apart and 41.8% for McTavish apart. He was worse away from McTavish, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than McTavish did.

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 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 37% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.