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

Drake Batherson

A minus-35 on a club that outshot the league, and twenty-one goals fewer on his ice than the chances deserved.

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

2018-19	OTT	20	3	6	9	-2	6	2	0	2	18	16.7	13:25
2019-20	OTT	23	3	7	10	-12	13	1	0	0	32	9.4	15:34
2020-21	OTT	56	17	17	34	-17	8	5	0	3	111	15.3	16:28
2021-22	OTT	46	17	27	44	+4	32	3	0	3	110	15.4	18:56
2022-23	OTT	82	22	40	62	-35	33	14	0	2	249	8.8	18:36
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	227	62	97	159	-62	92	25	0	10	520	11.9	17:23

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

22 goals and 40 assists in 82 games — 62 points — at 18:36 a night. Minus-35, 249 shots at 8.8 per cent, fourteen on the power play, 33 penalty minutes.

Fourteen power-play goals of twenty-two, on a unit that finished sixth in the league.

51.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 63rd percentile — and his ice finished 43-64 against an expectation of 51.84-49.48.

That is nine goals short at the attacking end and fourteen and a half past at the defensive: a twenty-three-goal swing against him on an above-average chance share. It is the largest gap between chances and goals of anybody in this batch, and on a club that finished thirtieth in finishing and twenty-seventh in goaltending it is mostly not his.

He started 58.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 85th percentile.

Five seasons, 227 games, 159 points, a career minus-62.

The Finesse Game

249 shots at a median of 30 feet, and twenty-two goals at 8.8 per cent.

Inside twenty: 95 shots on goal and 16 goals, 16.84 per cent, a shade under the league forward rate. From twenty to forty: 106 shots and 8 goals, 7.55 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 47 shots and none.

The mid-range band is where the season went. A hundred and six shots from the top of the circle and eight goals is four below what the league would have produced, and the forty-seven from range produced nothing at all.

199 wrist shots out of 362 tracked attempts, with 33 tip-ins and eleven slap. 88.9 mph at the 38th percentile.

97 career assists against 62 goals. The passing is the better half and the fourteen power-play goals say the shot works where it is set up for him.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 209, with 33 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.4 mph, the 59th percentile; 1.4 bursts a game, the 69th; 3.05 miles a game, the 82nd.

Above the league in mileage and around it in speed, from a 6-3 winger — an ordinary and adequate set of readings.

He does not play a physical game for his size, does not forecheck heavy, and does not win pucks on the wall. Thirty-three penalty minutes from a 209-pound winger is the tell.

What he does is find the soft ice and shoot from it, and on a club with Tkachuk and Stützle doing the hard work, that division of labour is deliberate.

The Intangibles

One hundred and twenty-first overall in 2017, the fourth round, and 159 points in 227 games.

The career minus-62 across five seasons is the second-worst figure in this chapter and belongs to an organisation that has finished outside the playoffs in every one of them.

He is twenty-five, signed long, and the file’s honest question is the mid-range shooting. A winger who takes a hundred shots a year from the top of the circle has to convert them at the league rate; four seasons of not doing so is beginning to look like a description rather than a run of luck.

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
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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“97 career assists against 62 goals. The passing is the better half and the fourteen power-play goals say the shot works where it is set up for him.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not play a physical game for his size, does not forecheck heavy, and does not win pucks on the wall.”
net-fronthe lacks it· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“What he does is find the soft ice and shoot from it, and on a club with Tkachuk and Stützle doing the hard work, that division of labour is deliberate.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,158 minutes

Expected goals: 51.2%; 61st pct
Shot attempts: 51.4%; 64th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 43 for, 64 against. Expected: 51.8 and 49.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

58th

Numbers

61st

The two rank him within 3 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 67 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, 2022-23 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 64th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.38 a game
Distance: 3.05 miles a game
Hardest shot: 88.9 mph; 62nd 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

2022-23 · 1158 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: OTT took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.2% — 0.2 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,158 minutes at five-on-five — 80th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Shane Pinto	50.7%	51.8%	49.6%
Alex DeBrincat	49.7%	52.6%	50.8%
Thomas Chabot	51.9%	50.7%	51.4%

50.7% together, 51.8% for him apart and 49.6% for Pinto 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

360 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 24 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 39% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.