This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Eeli Tolvanen
Seattle Kraken Right Wing
Waived by Nashville in December, eighteen goals by April, and above the league rate from every distance.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | NSH | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0.0 | 12:07 |
| 2018-19 | NSH | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | +2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 50.0 | 13:16 |
| 2020-21 | NSH | 40 | 11 | 11 | 22 | -10 | 4 | 6 | 0 | 4 | 65 | 16.9 | 14:48 |
| 2021-22 | NSH | 75 | 11 | 12 | 23 | -7 | 16 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 151 | 7.3 | 13:26 |
| 2022-23 | NSH/SEA | 61 | 18 | 13 | 31 | +8 | 14 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 116 | 15.5 | 14:31 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 183 | 41 | 37 | 78 | -7 | 34 | 11 | 0 | 9 | 337 | 12.2 | 14:04 |
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
18 goals and 13 assists in 61 games — 31 points — at 14:31 a night between Nashville and Seattle. Plus-8, 116 shots at 15.5 per cent, four on the power play, four game-winners, 14 penalty minutes.
Eighteen goals is a career high by seven.
51.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 740 minutes, the 56th percentile, with his ice at 41-29 against an expectation of 28.67-27.14 — twelve goals more than the chances called for at the good end, on 740 minutes, which is the second-largest proportional overshoot on the roster behind Jared McCann’s.
He started 50.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 51st percentile.
The Finesse Game
116 shots at a median of 33 feet, with 36 per cent of his attempts from between twenty and forty feet.
Inside twenty feet: 21 shots on goal and six goals — 28.57 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 57 shots and nine goals, 15.79 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 29 shots and three goals, 10.34, against a league rate of 4.16.
Above the rate at all three distances, and well above it at two of them. He is one of the twenty-eight forwards in the league who managed that on twenty or more shots on goal from every band.
A 15.5 per cent shooting percentage against a career 12.2 across 183 games. On 116 shots the excess is about four goals — a real season rather than a fabricated one, and still a season that will regress.
168 tracked attempts, 41 of them slap shots — a 24.4 per cent share, very high for a winger — and 28 snap. 94.8 mph at the 77th percentile.
And the three goals from beyond forty feet at 10.34 per cent are, on twenty-nine shots, the same kind of noise this book has spent four chapters describing from the other direction. The shot is genuinely hard; the rate is not repeatable.
The Physical Game
5-10 and 182 pounds. Top speed 22.3 mph at the 49th percentile, 0.9 bursts above twenty a game at the 48th, 2.24 miles a game at the 27th.
An unremarkable tracking line at fourteen and a half minutes a night. He is not fast and does not cover ground; the value is entirely in the release.
14 penalty minutes in 61 games and 34 in 183 career games — one of the cleanest records in this chapter. He avoids contact and is not asked to forecheck.
At 182 pounds on a third line, that is a real limitation on a club that plays the way this one does, and it is the reason fourteen minutes is the ceiling of the role.
The Intangibles
Thirtieth overall in 2017, five seasons, 183 games, 78 points across Nashville and Seattle.
He was a first-round pick who took five years to establish an NHL job, and Nashville gave up on him in the middle of the season that produced the numbers above.
He is twenty-four. Forty-one goals in 183 games at a 12.2 per cent career rate is a real shooting record on a small sample, and the club that claimed him got eighteen goals in half a season out of a waiver claim.
What the file needs is a full season. Everything in it is one half of one.
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 740 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.4%
- 62nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.9%
- 79th 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: 41 for, 29 against. Expected: 28.7 and 27.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 8 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 — 70 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 · 61 games
- Top speed
- 22.3 mph
- 56th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.87 a game
- Distance
- 2.24 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 94.8 mph
- 91st 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 · 600 minutes at five-on-five
- Yanni Gourde86%
- Jesper Frodenoff the roster11%
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
- SEA took 52.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.4% — 0.9 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 740 minutes at five-on-five — 33rd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yanni Gourde | 53.0% | 47.1% | 53.7% |
| Oliver Bjorkstrand | 50.7% | 52.3% | 51.5% |
| Vince Dunn | 51.7% | 51.2% | 55.4% |
53.0% together, 47.1% for him apart and 53.7% for Gourde apart. He was worse away from Gourde, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Gourde did.
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
158 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 18 of them goals. His median goal came from 28 feet. 20% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 28% from beyond forty.