Connor Murphy

13 years of shutdown minutes on bad teams, arriving here with a body that has taken a great deal of punishment.

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

2013-14	PHX	30	1	7	8	+5	10	0	0	1	30	3.3	17:59
2014-15	ARI	73	4	3	7	-27	42	0	0	0	72	5.6	16:48
2015-16	ARI	78	6	11	17	+5	48	1	0	1	101	5.9	20:31
2016-17	ARI	77	2	15	17	-13	45	0	1	1	81	2.5	19:11
2017-18	CHI	76	2	12	14	-3	34	0	0	0	109	1.8	16:22
2018-19	CHI	52	5	8	13	+12	40	0	0	1	84	5.9	19:29
2019-20	CHI	58	5	14	19	+2	27	0	0	0	117	4.3	21:15
2020-21	CHI	50	3	12	15	+1	35	1	0	1	78	3.9	22:09
2021-22	CHI	57	4	6	10	-14	47	0	0	1	71	5.6	21:46
2022-23	CHI	80	7	6	13	-10	69	0	2	0	85	8.2	19:23
2023-24	CHI	46	2	6	8	-19	40	0	0	0	51	3.9	19:50
2024-25	CHI	68	2	17	19	-2	52	0	0	0	84	2.4	20:37
2025-26	CHI/EDM	80	5	12	17	-2	71	0	0	0	70	7.1	17:32
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	825	48	129	177	-65	560	2	3	6	1033	4.7	19:20

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

5 goals and 17 points in 80 games between Chicago and Edmonton, plus-1, on 20 and a half minutes a night. 825 career games and 177 career points, which tells you everything about what he is for.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 212, and he defends with all of it. He is a genuine net-front presence — he clears the crease, ties up sticks, and makes the front of his goal an unpleasant place to work. He blocks a lot of shots and pays for it.

He is a heavy hitter along the wall without hunting hits, which at his age is the correct way to play. The penalty kill is where he is most valuable: he takes away the middle of the ice and dares people to shoot from bad angles.

The Finesse Game

Almost none, and this is not a criticism so much as a job description. 48 goals in 13 years. He does not carry the puck, does not join the rush, and makes the short simple pass rather than the good one. When pressured hard he will put it off the glass, which is usually the right answer for his role and occasionally is not.

The Intangibles

The injury history is long and it is the whole risk. He has missed significant time repeatedly and the style of play is not one that gets gentler with age. Chicago kept him around through a full rebuild because the defensive value was never in question.

What Edmonton is buying is a right-shot defenseman who can kill penalties and defend a lead in June. Whether he is available in June is the question the club is betting on.

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.

durable· was available
80 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
38% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 5th 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 · 1,180 minutes

Expected goals: 46.8%; 27th pct
Shot attempts: 45.4%; 15th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 40 for, 44 against. Expected: 38.7 and 44.1.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

67th

Numbers

27th

Blind

27th

The report ranks him 40 points above where the numbers do. 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.

The same player was graded a second time from his biography and his box score alone, with the measured record withheld. That reading lands 0 points from the numbers; this one lands 40. Across the whole control the two distances come out the same, which is worth knowing in both directions: the arithmetic on both sides of the sighted reading did not buy it any accuracy, and it did not cost it any either.

All three 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 — 75 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 · 80 games

Top speed: 20.5 mph; 15th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.03 a game
Distance: 2.40 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.2 mph; 67th 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 — 1 goals, 3 assists, 13 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 with CHI · 815 minutes at five-on-five

Matt Grzelcykoff the roster44%
Wyatt Kaiser27%
Alex Vlasic21%

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: EDM took 51.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.8% — 4.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: 1,180 minutes at five-on-five — 80th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Matt Grzelcyk	45.3%	47.4%	44.6%
Darnell Nurse	50.3%	45.5%	49.0%
Jason Dickinson	47.6%	46.5%	44.5%

45.3% together, 47.4% for him apart and 44.6% for Grzelcyk 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

101 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 36 feet. 6% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 73% from beyond forty.