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

Connor Clifton

A plus-20 on the best defensive club in hockey, arriving at the worst one.

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 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	232	10	33	43	+37	157	0	1	0	263	3.8	16:59

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

5 goals and 18 assists in 78 games for Boston — 23 points at 17:51 a night, plus-20, with a shorthanded goal on 93 shots and 60 penalty minutes.

51.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,263 minutes, the 60th percentile, on the club that won 65 games. That context has to be applied to every number here: his ice went 58-41 against an expectation of 53.45-51.23, and ten of those saved goals were a .938 goaltender rather than a third-pairing defenceman.

The Finesse Game

93 attempts at a median of 45 feet, 58 per cent from beyond 40, converting at 5.38 per cent. 43 points in 232 career games.

There is no meaningful offensive game. The first pass is quick and reasonably clean and that is where it stops.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 196, and he plays much bigger — 157 penalty minutes in 232 games, and he hits everything. He is aggressive to the point of recklessness, he steps up at the blue line, and he will fight.

The skating is decent at 22.6 mph, the 65th percentile. The aggression is the whole value and it is also the risk: a defenceman who steps up and misses on a club with no goaltending behind him is a different proposition from one who does it in front of Ullmark.

The Intangibles

A hundred and thirty-third overall in 2013, out of Quinnipiac, and a fifth-round pick with 232 NHL games and a Cup Final appearance.

He is 28 and has signed here for three years. Buffalo has bought a hard, willing, limited defenceman to solve a problem the numbers say is real — the club had nobody who hurt anybody — and the caution is that his best season happened somewhere the goaltending erased his mistakes.

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
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“he plays much bigger — 157 penalty minutes in 232 games, and he hits everything”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“He is aggressive to the point of recklessness, he steps up at the blue line, and he will fight.”
transitionpresent and ordinary· carries it out; gains the line under control
“The first pass is quick and reasonably clean and that is where it stops.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,263 minutes

Expected goals: 51.1%; 60th pct
Shot attempts: 48.8%; 44th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 58 for, 41 against. Expected: 53.5 and 51.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

55th

Numbers

60th

The two rank him within 5 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 120 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 with BOS · 1263 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: BOS took 53.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.1% — 2.4 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 1,263 minutes at five-on-five — 88th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Derek Forbort	46.9%	53.7%	47.0%
Charlie Coyle	49.9%	51.6%	50.6%
David Pastrnak	54.2%	49.6%	54.5%

46.9% together, 53.7% for him apart and 47.0% for Forbort apart. He was better away from Forbort, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Forbort.

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

132 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 12% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 58% from beyond forty.