Photo by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Connor Clifton

Concedes the outside on purpose, and it worked better than almost anyone noticed.

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

2018-19	BOS	19	0	1	1	+5	15	0	0	0	22	0.0	17:42
2019-20	BOS	31	2	0	2	+4	12	0	0	0	20	10.0	14:25
2020-21	BOS	44	1	6	7	+10	38	0	0	0	48	2.1	18:13
2021-22	BOS	60	2	8	10	-2	32	0	0	0	80	2.5	16:04
2022-23	BOS	78	5	18	23	+20	60	0	1	0	93	5.4	17:51
2023-24	BUF	79	4	14	18	+12	88	0	0	1	77	5.2	16:33
2024-25	BUF	73	1	15	16	-6	45	0	0	0	63	1.6	16:03
2025-26	PIT	50	2	4	6	+5	53	0	0	1	35	5.7	16:46
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	434	17	66	83	+48	343	0	1	2	438	3.9	16:43

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 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

2 goals and 4 assists in 50 games, plus-5, at 16:46 a night with 53 penalty minutes. His 5-on-5 work was done in Pittsburgh.

The Finesse Game

There is none to speak of and he has never claimed otherwise. 59 unblocked attempts and 2 goals from a median distance of 54 feet, with 8 per cent from inside 20. 6 points in 50 games.

The Physical Game

6 foot even, 196, and he plays far larger. 53 penalty minutes in 50 games, an appetite for contact that borders on reckless, and a willingness to take a run at anybody. He has built an 8-year career on being irritating.

The Intangibles

The interesting split, and the second defenceman in this book to show it. He was on for only 48.4 per cent of the shot attempts — 39th percentile — but 55.1 per cent of the expected goals, which is 83rd. Opponents had the puck and could not get to the middle with it.

That is a real defensive skill and the crude possession number hides it entirely. The expected goals ran 34.2 to 27.9 in his favour across 739 minutes.

He is 31, a fifth-round pick, and 434 games into a career nobody projected. On a Boston blue line where the rates were mostly poor, he arrives as one of the few with evidence behind him.

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

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
37% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 4th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 739 minutes

Expected goals: 55.1%; 88th pct
Shot attempts: 48.2%; 38th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 31 for, 27 against. Expected: 34.2 and 27.9.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

11th

Numbers

88th

The numbers rank him 77 points above where the report does. It was written with these numbers on screen and departs from them anyway, which makes the gap a judgment rather than an oversight. 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 656 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, 2025-26 · 50 games

Top speed: 22.7 mph; 87th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.52 a game
Distance: 2.34 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.0 mph; 42nd 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 0 goals, 1 assists, 13 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 with PIT · 739 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, 2025-26

The club: PIT took 51.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.1% — 3.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 739 minutes at five-on-five — 33rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Ryan Shea	56.4%	54.2%	51.2%
Thomas Novak	60.2%	52.9%	53.9%
Ben Kindel	55.3%	55.0%	52.4%

56.4% together, 54.2% for him apart and 51.2% for Shea apart. Shea was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Shea than for him.

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

59 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 44 feet. 8% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 71% from beyond forty.