Christian Fischer

Five goals in seventy-nine games, forty-five per cent of his shots from inside twenty feet, and eleven minutes a night.

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

2016-17	ARI	7	3	0	3	0	0	0	0	1	10	30.0	12:20
2017-18	ARI	79	15	18	33	-17	14	5	0	3	154	9.7	13:54
2018-19	ARI	71	11	7	18	-13	27	0	0	0	116	9.5	13:10
2019-20	ARI	56	6	3	9	+2	16	0	0	1	83	7.2	11:01
2020-21	ARI	52	3	8	11	-10	6	0	0	0	47	6.4	12:45
2021-22	ARI	53	5	5	10	-15	14	1	0	0	76	6.6	13:07
2022-23	ARI	80	13	14	27	-7	20	0	1	0	122	10.7	14:51
2023-24	DET	79	5	14	19	0	36	0	1	0	86	5.8	11:24
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	477	61	69	130	-60	133	6	2	5	694	8.8	12:58

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

Seventy-nine games, 5 goals and 14 assists with 1 shorthanded, 11:24 a night and exactly even. He converted 5.81 per cent of 86 shots against a career 8.79 across 694.

He took 45.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 831 minutes, the 22nd percentile, and his ice went 31-33 against an expectation of 30.14-36.59. An even rating on a club that conceded 274 goals is the best thing on this page.

The Finesse Game

Eighty-six shots at a median of 24 feet with 45 per cent from inside 20, and 5 went in. Sixty-one goals in 477 career games at 8.79 per cent is the level and there is no reason to expect a change at 27.

Sixty-nine career assists. The offensive game is not the reason he is employed.

The Physical Game

He forechecks hard and finishes his checks at 6-2 and 212, and he is first in on the puck on almost every shift. Thirty-six penalty minutes in 79 games is a moderate rate for a man who initiates that much.

He wins the wall against wingers and holds pucks below the goal line for a change. That is the entire job and he does it at eleven minutes a night without complaint.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2015 out of Chicago, seven seasons in Arizona and one in Detroit, and 477 games. A career minus-60 is almost entirely Arizona.

He is 27 and the twelfth forward on a club that missed the playoffs. That is a career and it is an honest one.

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.

durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks hard and finishes his checks at 6-2 and 212, and he is first in on the puck on almost every shift.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“He wins the wall against wingers and holds pucks below the goal line for a change.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 831 minutes

Expected goals: 45.2%; 23rd pct
Shot attempts: 42.8%; 7th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 31 for, 33 against. Expected: 30.1 and 36.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

8th

Numbers

23rd

The two rank him within 15 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 — 57 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 · 79 games

Top speed: 22.5 mph; 67th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.00 a game
Distance: 1.81 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.7 mph; 31st 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 · 831 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: DET took 45.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 45.2% — 0.7 below the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 831 minutes at five-on-five — 42nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Michael Rasmussen	45.9%	44.8%	43.6%
Andrew Copp	47.3%	44.0%	44.1%
Jeff Petry	49.3%	42.7%	47.4%

45.9% together, 44.8% for him apart and 43.6% for Rasmussen 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

114 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 46% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.