Dakota Mermis

Undrafted, seven seasons, and 47 of his 74 career games came last season.

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

2017-18	ARI	9	0	0	0	-2	0	0	0	0	7	0.0	10:59
2018-19	ARI	1	0	0	0	+1	0	0	0	0	0	—	11:20
2019-20	NJD	10	1	3	4	+7	4	0	0	0	17	5.9	19:13
2020-21	MIN	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	0.0	16:24
2021-22	MIN	2	0	0	0	+2	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	13:54
2022-23	MIN	2	0	0	0	-1	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	14:28
2023-24	MIN	47	3	5	8	-2	33	0	0	0	42	7.1	14:05
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	74	4	8	12	+5	37	0	0	0	70	5.7	14:28

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

47 games with Minnesota, 3 goals and 5 assists for 8 points, 33 penalty minutes, 14:05 a night and minus-2. He took 49.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 606 minutes, the 48th percentile, and his ice went 21-21 against an expectation of 21.76-22.30.

Level at both ends. Twenty-one goals for and 21 against on a 49.4 per cent chance share is a third-pairing defenceman doing exactly what the ice said he should.

The Finesse Game

69 attempts at a median of 56 feet with 74 per cent of them from beyond forty and 10 per cent from inside twenty, 39 of those on goal, converted at 7.1 per cent against a career 5.71 across 70 shots.

Four career goals and 8 assists in 74 games. There is no offence in this game and none is asked for; the puck goes off the glass or at the net from the blue line, and three goals last season is more than he had scored in six seasons before it.

The Physical Game

He is 6-0 and 197 and took 33 penalty minutes.

Thirty-seven career penalty minutes in 74 games. He defends through contact and finishes his checks, and thirty-three minutes in 47 games is a higher rate than anything else in his file.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, seven seasons across three organisations, the first of them this one.

A career plus-5 in 74 games from a man nobody drafted. He first played in the league in 2017-18 and had played 27 NHL games in six seasons before last one gave him 47.

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
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.

playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“There is no offence in this game and none is asked for; the puck goes off the glass or at the net from the blue line, and three goals last season is more than he had scored in six seasons before it.”
undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“A career plus-5 in 74 games from a man nobody drafted.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 606 minutes

Expected goals: 49.4%; 48th pct
Shot attempts: 49.8%; 54th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 21 for, 21 against. Expected: 21.8 and 22.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

57th

Numbers

48th

The two rank him within 9 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 71 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, 2023-24 · 47 games

Top speed: 21.5 mph; 40th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.32 a game
Distance: 1.92 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.2 mph; 27th 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

2023-24 with MIN · 606 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, 2023-24

The club: MIN took 51.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.4% — 1.9 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 606 minutes at five-on-five — 25th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jon Merrill	50.0%	48.8%	51.2%
Marco Rossi	48.8%	49.7%	53.7%
Jake Middleton	42.8%	51.7%	48.9%

50.0% together, 48.8% for him apart and 51.2% for Merrill 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

69 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 48 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 74% from beyond forty.