This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Dennis Gilbert
Calgary Flames Defense
Ninety-five per cent of his shots from beyond forty feet, and twenty-seven penalty minutes in twenty-three games.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | CHI | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 12:46 |
| 2019-20 | CHI | 21 | 1 | 2 | 3 | -8 | 38 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 8.3 | 15:42 |
| 2020-21 | COL | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 6:43 |
| 2022-23 | CGY | 23 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 27 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 13 | 7.7 | 11:44 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 48 | 2 | 5 | 7 | -8 | 72 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 25 | 8.0 | 13:11 |
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
1 goal and 3 assists in 23 games — 4 points at 11:44 a night, even, on 13 shots and 27 penalty minutes.
55.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 265 minutes, the 87th percentile, on very sheltered usage — 45.8 per cent attacking-zone starts, the 97th percentile. Two hundred and sixty-five minutes describes nothing and the number should not be read as a finding.
The Finesse Game
13 attempts at a median of 55 feet, 95 per cent of them from beyond 40 and none from inside 20 — the most extreme shot chart on the club and close to a definition of a defenceman who never leaves the blue line.
7 points in 48 career NHL games. There is no offensive game whatever.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 216, and 72 penalty minutes in 48 career games is a very high rate — he hits, he fights, and he is there to make the club harder to play against.
The skating is poor: 21.7 mph at the 21st percentile and 0.1 bursts over twenty a game at the 3rd. He is a defenceman who can only defend what comes to him, and against a rush he is beaten and cannot recover.
The Intangibles
Ninety-first overall in 2015 to Chicago, out of Notre Dame, and four seasons of American League hockey with 48 NHL games attached.
He is 26. He is the eighth defenceman and the club’s designated fighter on the blue line, which is a role that has been disappearing for fifteen years — and on a team whose actual problem is a .892 save percentage, it is not the one that needed filling.
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.
“he hits, he fights, and he is there to make the club harder to play against”
“he hits, he fights, and he is there to make the club harder to play against”
“He is a defenceman who can only defend what comes to him”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 265 minutes
- Expected goals
- 55.2%
- 87th pct
- Shot attempts
- 56.3%
- 93rd 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: 11 for, 11 against. Expected: 11.8 and 9.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 73 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 99 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 54 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 · 265 minutes at five-on-five
- Chris Tanev18%
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
- CGY took 55.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.2% — level with the club he did it on.
- The role
- 265 minutes at five-on-five — 4th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milan Lucic | 41.2% | 61.5% | 49.9% |
| Nazem Kadri | 60.4% | 53.1% | 53.4% |
| Dillon Dube | 55.0% | 55.2% | 49.9% |
41.2% together, 61.5% for him apart and 49.9% for Lucic apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.
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
19 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 56 feet. 0% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 95% from beyond forty.