This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Bryan Rust

Twenty goals on the highest attacking-zone start share of any Pittsburgh forward but one, and nothing at all from beyond forty feet.

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

2014-15	PIT	14	1	1	2	-3	4	0	0	0	34	2.9	12:02
2015-16	PIT	41	4	7	11	+1	12	0	0	1	68	5.9	12:30
2016-17	PIT	57	15	13	28	+4	8	0	0	1	110	13.6	13:38
2017-18	PIT	69	13	25	38	+11	26	2	2	3	123	10.6	16:03
2018-19	PIT	72	18	17	35	+10	24	0	2	4	141	12.8	15:54
2019-20	PIT	55	27	29	56	+14	30	8	1	4	151	17.9	19:46
2020-21	PIT	56	22	20	42	+9	18	6	0	6	154	14.3	19:43
2021-22	PIT	60	24	34	58	+7	14	9	0	1	180	13.3	18:46
2022-23	PIT	81	20	26	46	-4	31	2	0	2	211	9.5	17:54
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	505	144	172	316	+49	167	27	5	22	1172	12.3	16:47

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

20 goals and 26 assists in 81 games — 46 points — at 17:54 a night. Minus-4, 211 shots at 9.5 per cent, two on the power play, two game-winners, 31 penalty minutes.

It is his lowest points-per-game rate since 2018-19, and 81 games is the most he has played in a season.

53.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 77th percentile, with his ice at 51-42 against an expectation of 55.79-47.99 across 1,113 minutes.

He started 66.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 99th percentile, three tenths of a point behind Evgeni Malkin and ahead of every other forward on the roster.

The Finesse Game

211 shots at a median of 20 feet, with 51 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty: 102 shots on goal and 14 goals, 13.73 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 76 shots and 5 goals, 6.58 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 26 shots and none.

Below the rate at every distance, on 204 shots on goal. That is the whole of the argument about last season: the shot chart is the same one that produced 27 goals in 2019-20 and 24 in 2021-22, and the puck stopped going in.

A 9.5 per cent shooting percentage against a career 12.3, at thirty. On 211 shots that difference is about six goals, which is most of the gap between this season and his last three.

38 of his 301 tracked attempts are tip-ins and 46 are backhands — 27.9 per cent of everything he shoots is generated inside the goaltender’s reach. A 15.3 per cent backhand share is the eighth-highest in the league. 92.2 mph at the 61st percentile, on fourteen slap shots.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 202 pounds. 1.8 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 82nd percentile, at 22.3 mph and the 49th, with 2.78 miles a game at the 66th.

He forechecks on the first man and arrives at speed, which is the reason he has spent seven seasons on the top two lines of a club that has never particularly needed him to score.

31 penalty minutes and 167 in 505 career games. The contact is all in the pursuit rather than after the whistle.

He kills penalties and has five career shorthanded goals, which for a winger who has never played twenty minutes a night is a real part of the file.

The Intangibles

Eightieth overall in 2010, the third round, nine seasons, 505 games, 316 points, all of them here.

144 goals and a career 12.3 per cent, built almost entirely between 2019 and 2022: 27, 22 and 24 goals in three consecutive shortened or partial seasons.

He is thirty-one and signed for a long time on a club with no young forwards. The measurements say a useful top-six winger having a bad finishing year rather than a player falling off, and the difference between those two readings will not be settled until the following season.

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

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.

clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live
5 of his 20 goals late or in overtime, 99th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
durable· was available
81 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
66% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 98th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He kills penalties and has five career shorthanded goals, which for a winger who has never played twenty minutes a night is a real part of the file.”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks on the first man and arrives at speed, which is the reason he has spent seven seasons on the top two lines of a club that has never particularly needed him to score.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,113 minutes

Expected goals: 53.8%; 80th pct
Shot attempts: 53.3%; 81st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 51 for, 42 against. Expected: 55.8 and 48.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

90th

Numbers

80th

The two rank him within 10 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 77 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, 2022-23 · 81 games

Top speed: 22.3 mph; 56th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.78 a game
Distance: 2.78 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.2 mph; 79th 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

2022-23 · 1113 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: PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.8% — 0.8 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,113 minutes at five-on-five — 73rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Sidney Crosby	51.3%	56.0%	56.4%
Jake Guentzel	51.5%	55.7%	55.5%
Evgeni Malkin	56.9%	51.2%	53.4%

51.3% together, 56.0% for him apart and 56.4% for Crosby apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

290 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 19 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.