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

Cole Sillinger

Sixteen goals as an 18-year-old rookie, three as a 19-year-old sophomore.

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

2021-22	CBJ	79	16	15	31	-22	37	0	0	3	148	10.8	13:42
2022-23	CBJ	64	3	8	11	-23	22	2	0	0	93	3.2	13:19
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	143	19	23	42	-45	59	2	0	3	241	7.9	13:32

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

3 goals and 8 assists in 64 games, minus-23, 13:19 a night, on 93 shots at 3.2 per cent.

The year before, at 18, he scored 16 goals and 31 points in 79 games. The collapse is almost entirely the shooting percentage: 10.8 per cent as a rookie, 3.2 per cent as a sophomore, on similar volume.

44.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 18th percentile, with his ice at 20-44 against an expectation of 27.26-33.94. Seven goals short at one end and ten long at the other, which on a club with the worst goaltending in the league is a shared problem.

The Finesse Game

93 shots at a median of 27 feet, 32 per cent from inside twenty.

Inside forty: 69 shots, two goals — 2.90 per cent. Beyond forty: 23 shots, one.

Two goals on 69 close-range shots is the number to hold onto. The league converts inside forty feet at more than four times that rate, and there is no version of a season in which a player repeats it. Whatever else is true of him, the three goals are not a measurement of his finishing.

90.5 mph at the 47th percentile. Nothing wrong with the shot.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 202. 22.6 mph at the 67th percentile, 0.7 bursts a game at the 38th, 2.12 miles a game at the 21st.

The low mileage on thirteen-minute nights is not remarkable. What is worth noting is the burst count: for a young centre playing a checking role he does not get to speed often, and the possession numbers do not argue with that.

22 penalty minutes in 64 games.

The Intangibles

12th overall in 2021, born in Columbus while his father Mike was playing for the Blue Jackets, and drafted by the club twenty years later.

He went straight from the WHL to 79 NHL games at 18 — one of very few players in this book who did — and the second season is what that usually costs. He turned 20 in May. The shooting percentage will correct; the 18th-percentile possession share is the real question.

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.

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.

faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“for a young centre playing a checking role he does not get to speed often”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 758 minutes

Expected goals: 44.5%; 18th pct
Shot attempts: 44.3%; 13th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 20 for, 44 against. Expected: 27.3 and 33.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

4th

Numbers

18th

The two rank him within 14 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 — 51 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 · 64 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 72nd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.72 a game
Distance: 2.12 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.5 mph; 69th 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 · 758 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: CBJ took 44.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.5% — 0.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 758 minutes at five-on-five — 36th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Erik Gudbranson	40.6%	46.9%	40.7%
Andrew Peeke	51.3%	41.4%	42.1%
Kent Johnson	38.0%	46.9%	42.5%

40.6% together, 46.9% for him apart and 40.7% for Gudbranson apart. He was better away from Gudbranson, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Gudbranson.

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

137 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 32% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 24% from beyond forty.