This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Colin Miller
New Jersey Devils Defense
A 101.1 mph shot, forty per cent of his attempts slapped, and eighty-three long shots on goal at twice the rate his position returns.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | BOS | 42 | 3 | 13 | 16 | 0 | 39 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 59 | 5.1 | 15:48 |
| 2016-17 | BOS | 61 | 6 | 7 | 13 | 0 | 55 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 85 | 7.1 | 15:49 |
| 2017-18 | VGK | 82 | 10 | 31 | 41 | -4 | 53 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 177 | 5.7 | 19:21 |
| 2018-19 | VGK | 65 | 3 | 26 | 29 | 0 | 44 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 131 | 2.3 | 19:39 |
| 2019-20 | BUF | 51 | 1 | 10 | 11 | -9 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 79 | 1.3 | 17:08 |
| 2020-21 | BUF | 48 | 4 | 8 | 12 | -20 | 27 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 64 | 6.3 | 18:00 |
| 2021-22 | BUF | 38 | 2 | 12 | 14 | -2 | 21 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 48 | 4.2 | 18:59 |
| 2022-23 | DAL | 79 | 6 | 15 | 21 | +23 | 37 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 106 | 5.7 | 16:46 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 466 | 35 | 122 | 157 | -12 | 298 | 9 | 0 | 6 | 749 | 4.7 | 17:46 |
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
6 goals and 15 assists in 79 games — 21 points — for Dallas, at 16:46 a night. Plus-23, 106 shots, 37 penalty minutes, three game-winners.
51.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 65th percentile — and his ice finished 61-38 against an expectation of 51.43-47.83. Ten goals better than the chances at the attacking end and ten better at the defensive, which is a twenty-goal swing past expectation in one season and is mostly a statement about the goaltender behind him rather than about him.
He started 58.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 86th percentile: 474 attacking draws against 332.
Eight seasons, 466 games, 157 points, five organisations.
The Finesse Game
106 shots at a median of 52 feet, 78 per cent of them from beyond forty, and four shots all season from inside twenty.
Beyond forty feet: 83 shots on goal and 5 goals — 6.02 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. He is the second Devils defenceman on the right side of that arithmetic and he got there the same way Hamilton did.
68 slap shots out of 170 tracked attempts — forty per cent, in a league where the defenceman’s slap-shot share has been falling for six seasons. 101.1 mph at the 98th percentile, which on that count is one of the readings in this book worth taking at face value.
The obvious explanation is that a point shot pays when it is hard enough to beat a goaltender through traffic and does not when it is a wrist shot into a shin pad. Across the 109 defencemen in this book with sixty or more long shots on goal, that explanation is worth r = 0.291 and about a point and a half of conversion between the top and bottom quarters of slap-shot share. It is real, it is small, and it is not why he is at 6.02.
122 career assists against 35 goals. The offence is the shot and the outlet, and there is not much creation between them.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 200, with 37 penalty minutes.
Top speed 22.0 mph, the 37th percentile; 0.4 bursts a game, the 18th; 2.43 miles a game, the 39th. Below the league in all three.
He is thirty and does not defend by skating. The gaps are closed with the stick and the body arrives late, and the reason the record has him on five organisations is that the defensive half has never held up under top-four minutes.
He is not a punishing defenceman and does not clear his net front. A second pair with a mobile partner is where the file works.
The Intangibles
One hundred and fifty-first overall in 2012, the fifth round, and eight seasons across Boston, Vegas, Buffalo, Dallas and now here.
The career line is 35 goals and 122 assists in 466 games, and the best of it was the 41 points in Vegas’s first season.
What New Jersey has bought is a right-handed shot from the point on a power play that finished eighth in the league. What it has to manage is the twenty minutes a night he should not be asked to play.
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
- 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.
- durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
- sheltered· is started in the attacking end
59% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 90th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
“He is not a punishing defenceman and does not clear his net front.”
“The gaps are closed with the stick and the body arrives late, and the reason the record has him on five organisations is that the defensive half has never held up under top-four minutes.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,251 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.8%
- 65th pct
- Shot attempts
- 53.5%
- 82nd pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 61 for, 38 against. Expected: 51.4 and 47.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 22 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 64 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 · 79 games
- Top speed
- 22.0 mph
- 67th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.38 a game
- Distance
- 2.43 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 101.1 mph
- 98th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
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 with DAL · 1251 minutes at five-on-five
- Ryan Suter18%
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
- DAL took 52.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.8% — 0.2 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- First pair, 1,251 minutes at five-on-five — 87th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miro Heiskanen | 52.8% | 50.4% | 53.9% |
| Jason Robertson | 57.1% | 48.8% | 60.4% |
| Joe Pavelski | 56.7% | 49.2% | 58.1% |
52.8% together, 50.4% for him apart and 53.9% for Heiskanen 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
167 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 50 feet. 5% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 78% from beyond forty.