This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Christian Dvorak

Thirty games, a career minus-55, and 452 games of being somebody's third centre.

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

2016-17	ARI	78	15	18	33	+7	22	2	0	1	88	17.1	15:37
2017-18	ARI	78	15	22	37	-19	22	2	0	2	151	9.9	16:26
2018-19	ARI	20	2	5	7	-2	2	1	0	1	25	8.0	14:23
2019-20	ARI	70	18	20	38	+6	12	6	0	2	134	13.4	16:42
2020-21	ARI	56	17	14	31	-11	12	8	1	4	95	17.9	18:24
2021-22	MTL	56	11	22	33	-19	24	1	0	1	87	12.6	17:22
2022-23	MTL	64	10	18	28	-12	6	0	1	1	88	11.4	16:52
2023-24	MTL	30	5	4	9	-5	4	1	0	0	35	14.3	15:32
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	452	93	123	216	-55	104	21	2	12	703	13.2	16:36

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

30 games, 5 goals and 4 assists for 9 points, 1 on the power play, 4 penalty minutes, 15:32 a night and minus-5. He took 43.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 387 minutes, the 11th percentile, and his ice went 12-15 against an expectation of 14.07-18.58.

Two goals of scoring that did not arrive and four fewer conceded than the chances called for. Thirty games is the third season in a row he has not come close to finishing.

The Finesse Game

45 attempts at a median of 21 feet with 44 per cent from inside 20, converted at 14.3 per cent against a career 13.23.

123 career assists in 452 games. He is a distributor and the numbers say the hands are intact; the problem has never been skill. He reads a play a beat before it happens and cannot get to the ice that would let him use it.

The Physical Game

He is 6-1 and 190 and defends with position and stick.

4 penalty minutes in 30 games is almost nothing. He takes the defensive-zone draw, blocks shots, and kills penalties with 2 career shorthanded goals.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2014 out of Palos, Illinois, eight seasons across two organisations, and 216 points in 452 games at a career minus-55.

He is 28 and has played 56, 64 and 30 games in the last three seasons. A third centre who cannot stay in the lineup on a club that needs three of them.

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
he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
39% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 10th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“He takes the defensive-zone draw, blocks shots, and kills penalties with 2 career shorthanded goals.”
shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it
“He takes the defensive-zone draw, blocks shots, and kills penalties with 2 career shorthanded goals.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He takes the defensive-zone draw, blocks shots, and kills penalties with 2 career shorthanded goals.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“He reads a play a beat before it happens and cannot get to the ice that would let him use it.”
punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is 6-1 and 190 and defends with position and stick.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 387 minutes

Expected goals: 43.1%; 11th pct
Shot attempts: 42.9%; 8th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 12 for, 15 against. Expected: 14.1 and 18.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

24th

Numbers

11th

The two rank him within 13 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 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, 2023-24 · 30 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 64th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.27 a game
Distance: 2.58 miles a game
Hardest shot: 80.0 mph; 19th 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

2023-24 · 387 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, 2023-24

The club: MTL took 46.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.1% — 3.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: 387 minutes at five-on-five — 12th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Juraj Slafkovsky	48.2%	40.2%	48.8%
Brendan Gallagher	49.2%	39.1%	50.4%
Mike Matheson	43.1%	43.1%	44.6%

48.2% together, 40.2% for him apart and 48.8% for Slafkovsky apart. He was worse away from Slafkovsky, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Slafkovsky 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

45 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 23 feet. 44% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.