Buddy Robinson

Six-six and 232 pounds, 32 games, and 53 in five NHL seasons since going undrafted.

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

2015-16	OTT	3	1	1	2	+2	4	0	0	1	5	20.0	8:36
2016-17	OTT	4	0	0	0	0	2	0	0	0	4	0.0	6:57
2019-20	CGY	5	1	0	1	0	7	0	0	0	6	16.7	12:14
2020-21	CGY	9	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	6	0.0	7:08
2021-22	ANA	32	1	5	6	+2	19	0	0	0	38	2.6	9:15
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	53	3	6	9	+4	32	0	0	1	59	5.1	8:58

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

1 goal and 5 assists in 32 games for Anaheim — 6 points at 9:15 a night, plus-2, with 19 penalty minutes. He signed here in the summer.

48.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 279 minutes. His ice went 8-5 against an expectation of 11.14-11.63 — three fewer goals for than the chances promised and seven fewer against, over a sample far too small to mean it.

Two hundred and seventy-nine minutes is below the 500 this book requires before it will rank a player, so no percentiles are quoted here.

The Finesse Game

Thirty-eight shots and one goal in 32 games, from a median of 25 feet with 38 per cent from the slot. Nine points in 53 career NHL games at 30.

He has scored at every level below this one and has never done it here, which after five seasons is the answer rather than the question.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 232, which is as large as forwards come. 1.52 miles a game is a nine-minute-a-night artefact as much as a description of how he skates.

He is a net-front presence on a power play he does not play on and a fourth-line winger who is bigger than everybody, and that is the honest summary.

The Intangibles

Undrafted out of Lake Superior State, and 53 NHL games at 30 across three clubs.

Chicago is going to play a season it does not expect to win and needs bodies who will not complain about the minutes. That is the role, and there is nothing dishonourable about it.

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.

undraftedpresent and ordinary· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted out of Lake Superior State, and 53 NHL games at 30 across three clubs.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 279 minutes

Expected goals: 48.9%; 47th pct
Shot attempts: 46.9%; 28th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 8 for, 5 against. Expected: 11.1 and 11.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

17th

Numbers

47th

The numbers rank him 30 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 — 53 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 · 32 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 60th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.50 a game
Distance: 1.52 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.0 mph; 86th 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

2021-22 with ANA · 279 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, 2021-22

The club: ANA took 48.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.9% — 0.9 above the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 279 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nicolas Deslauriers	53.6%	39.5%	42.3%
Sam Carrick	49.0%	48.8%	44.7%
Kevin Shattenkirk	53.4%	45.6%	46.0%

53.6% together, 39.5% for him apart and 42.3% for Deslauriers 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

39 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 38% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 28% from beyond forty.