This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Drew O'Connor
Pittsburgh Penguins Left Wing
Six-foot-four, undrafted, 2.2 sprints a game on 1.64 miles of ice, and the fourth percentile of zone starts.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | PIT | 10 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0.0 | 8:57 |
| 2021-22 | PIT | 22 | 3 | 2 | 5 | -1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 40 | 7.5 | 10:17 |
| 2022-23 | PIT | 46 | 5 | 6 | 11 | -3 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 62 | 8.1 | 9:49 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 78 | 8 | 9 | 17 | -6 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 110 | 7.3 | 9:50 |
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
5 goals and 6 assists in 46 games — 11 points — at 9:49 a night. Minus-3, 62 shots at 8.1 per cent, 12 penalty minutes.
54 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 425 minutes, the 78th percentile, with his ice at 15-18 against an expectation of 19.80-16.87.
He started 31.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 4th percentile — 70 attacking draws against 155 defensive ones. That is a fourth-line winger being sent out to start in his own zone, which is a real assignment and not a demotion.
The 78th-percentile chance share out of that deployment is the number worth keeping from a forty-six-game season.
The Finesse Game
62 shots at a median of 21 feet, with 48 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.
Inside twenty feet: 31 shots on goal and four goals — 12.90 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 19 shots and one goal. Beyond forty: nine shots and none.
Below the rate from close range on a small sample. There is nothing here yet to read as a finishing profile: it is thirty-one shots.
91 tracked attempts, 52 wrist and 14 tip-in, four slap. 85.9 mph at the 15th percentile.
The shot is soft and the volume is generated at the net front, which for a 6-4 winger on a fourth line is the right way round.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 209 pounds, with 2.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 89th percentile on 1.64 miles a game at the 2nd.
That is one of the sharpest pairs of numbers in the edition and it means one thing: very short shifts skated flat out. He is not covering ground because he is on the ice for under ten minutes; he is sprinting at the 89th percentile of the league while he is out there.
Top speed 22.5 mph at the 61st percentile, so the sprints are frequent rather than fast.
He forechecks first man at speed and finishes the check, which is why a club with three thirty-six-year-olds keeps finding minutes for him.
12 penalty minutes in 46 games. The contact is all legal and all in pursuit.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, out of three seasons and 78 games, all of them here.
A 6-4 winger who was never drafted, who reached the NHL at twenty-two by way of nobody’s shortlist, and who has now put together a season of fourth-line minutes at the 4th percentile of zone starts with a positive chance share.
He is twenty-five, which is late for a first real season, and the file is small enough that everything in it is provisional. The two things it does say are that the club trusts him in his own end and that the tracking line is genuinely unusual.
Eight goals in 78 career games. Nobody is expecting more.
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
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.
- hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
31% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 6th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
“A 6-4 winger who was never drafted, who reached the NHL at twenty-two by way of nobody's shortlist, and who has now put together a season of fourth-line minutes at the 4th percentile of zone starts with a positive chance share.”
“He forechecks first man at speed and finishes the check, which is why a club with three thirty-six-year-olds keeps finding minutes for him.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 425 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54%
- 81st pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.3%
- 73rd 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: 15 for, 18 against. Expected: 19.8 and 16.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 28 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 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 · 46 games
- Top speed
- 22.5 mph
- 67th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.20 a game
- Distance
- 1.64 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 85.9 mph
- 41st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 · 425 minutes at five-on-five
- Jeff Carter37%
- Josh Archibaldoff the roster31%
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
- PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.0% — 1.0 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 425 minutes at five-on-five — 11th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brian Dumoulin | 56.9% | 51.9% | 49.7% |
| Jeff Carter | 47.4% | 58.3% | 48.3% |
| Marcus Pettersson | 53.7% | 54.1% | 55.3% |
56.9% together, 51.9% for him apart and 49.7% for Dumoulin 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
88 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 48% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.