This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Dmitry Orlov
San Jose Sharks Defense
A career plus-134 and 28 points in Carolina, signed in the summer to be the veteran on the youngest blue line in hockey.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-12 | WSH | 60 | 3 | 16 | 19 | +1 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 51 | 5.9 | 16:52 |
| 2012-13 | WSH | 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | +5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 14:57 |
| 2013-14 | WSH | 54 | 3 | 8 | 11 | -1 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 59 | 5.1 | 19:36 |
| 2015-16 | WSH | 82 | 8 | 21 | 29 | +8 | 26 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 90 | 8.9 | 16:02 |
| 2016-17 | WSH | 82 | 6 | 27 | 33 | +30 | 51 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 125 | 4.8 | 19:32 |
| 2017-18 | WSH | 82 | 10 | 21 | 31 | +10 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 125 | 8.0 | 23:08 |
| 2018-19 | WSH | 82 | 3 | 26 | 29 | +3 | 33 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 101 | 3.0 | 21:38 |
| 2019-20 | WSH | 69 | 4 | 23 | 27 | +5 | 36 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 105 | 3.8 | 22:10 |
| 2020-21 | WSH | 51 | 8 | 14 | 22 | +16 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 83 | 9.6 | 19:49 |
| 2021-22 | WSH | 76 | 12 | 23 | 35 | +25 | 44 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 127 | 9.4 | 20:58 |
| 2022-23 | WSH/BOS | 66 | 7 | 29 | 36 | +12 | 22 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 124 | 5.7 | 22:33 |
| 2023-24 | CAR | 82 | 6 | 20 | 26 | +4 | 36 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 129 | 4.7 | 17:19 |
| 2024-25 | CAR | 76 | 6 | 22 | 28 | +16 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 117 | 5.1 | 20:00 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 867 | 76 | 251 | 327 | +134 | 351 | 5 | 1 | 19 | 1237 | 6.1 | 19:57 |
This Season So Far
The 2025-26 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
6 goals and 22 assists in 76 games for Carolina — 28 points at 20:00 a night, plus-16, with 24 penalty minutes.
Carolina finished 13th in the league in goals against and 3rd on the penalty kill, so the plus-16 is partly a fact about the club. What it does establish is a full season of second-pair minutes on a good defensive team without anything going wrong.
The Finesse Game
117 attempts and 6 goals. The shot is heavy and it has produced double figures once in thirteen seasons.
22 assists is a career-typical number and it comes from the breakout. He escapes pressure by turning into it, he moves the puck early, and he has been a genuinely good transition defenceman for a decade.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 215 and built like a fire hydrant. He is very difficult to move off a puck, he clears his own crease against men half a foot taller, and he finishes checks.
24 penalty minutes in 76 games is a low rate for a player who plays that way. He is not an agitator and he does not retaliate, which is unusual for a defenceman with his reputation for hitting.
The Intangibles
A second-round pick in 2009 and 867 games with a career plus-134, most of it in Washington, where he won a Stanley Cup in 2018.
He is 34 and San Jose signed him in the summer. On a blue line whose regulars are 23, 26, 27 and 29, the job is to make the second pair survivable and to be traded in March.
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 escapes pressure by turning into it, he moves the puck early, and he has been a genuinely good transition defenceman for a decade.”
“He is very difficult to move off a puck, he clears his own crease against men half a foot taller, and he finishes checks.”
“He is very difficult to move off a puck, he clears his own crease against men half a foot taller, and he finishes checks.”
“He is very difficult to move off a puck, he clears his own crease against men half a foot taller, and he finishes checks.”
“He is not an agitator and he does not retaliate, which is unusual for a defenceman with his reputation for hitting.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,255 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.6%
- 88th pct
- Shot attempts
- 59.4%
- 98th 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: 55 for, 55 against. Expected: 56.6 and 47.0.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 16 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 76 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, 2024-25 · 76 games
- Top speed
- 21.6 mph
- 49th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.25 a game
- Distance
- 2.77 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 100.1 mph
- 97th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 89.7
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
2024-25 with CAR · 1255 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, 2024-25
- The club
- CAR took 55.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.6% — 1.3 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,255 minutes at five-on-five — 89th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jalen Chatfield | 56.0% | 48.2% | 49.4% |
| Sebastian Aho | 53.9% | 55.0% | 59.8% |
| Andrei Svechnikov | 53.2% | 55.3% | 52.7% |
56.0% together, 48.2% for him apart and 49.4% for Chatfield apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
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
192 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 51 feet. 8% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 67% from beyond forty.