This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →

Erik Brannstrom

Five-foot-ten, four goals in 190 games, and 68 shots on goal that produced two.

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

2018-19	OTT	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	—	18:04
2019-20	OTT	31	0	4	4	-9	16	0	0	0	38	0.0	14:51
2020-21	OTT	30	2	11	13	+3	25	1	0	0	42	4.8	16:21
2021-22	OTT	53	0	14	14	-17	30	0	0	0	86	0.0	19:46
2022-23	OTT	74	2	16	18	+5	38	0	0	0	74	2.7	16:07
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	190	4	45	49	-18	109	1	0	0	240	1.7	16:59

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

2 goals and 16 assists in 74 games — 18 points — at 16:07 a night. Plus-5, 74 shots at 2.7 per cent, 38 penalty minutes.

54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 79th percentile and the second-highest of any Ottawa defenceman, with his ice at 39-40 against an expectation of 44.53-37.63 across 1,010 minutes — five and a half goals short at the attacking end.

Attach the deployment to the share. He started 55.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 74th percentile: 325 attacking draws against 264, while Zub took 332 of the other kind. On this blue line the two figures move together and the club has been explicit about which end each man gets.

Five seasons, 190 games, 49 points, and four career goals.

The Finesse Game

74 shots at a median of 46 feet, and two goals in seventy-four games.

Beyond forty: 35 shots on goal and none. From twenty to forty: 25 shots and 2 goals. Inside twenty: eight shots and none.

Four goals in 190 career games from a first-round pick is the number the file cannot get around.

54 wrist shots and 31 slap out of 110 tracked attempts — a 28 per cent slap share, which is high — and 93.0 mph at the 64th percentile. The shot is ordinary and it is used more than the results justify.

45 career assists against 4 goals. Everything here is the pass: he takes the puck off the wall, turns, and moves it, and sixteen assists from sixteen minutes a night is a real rate.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 185 pounds, with 38 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.1 mph, the 40th percentile; 0.5 bursts a game, the 25th; 2.37 miles a game, the 36th.

That is the difficulty. A 5-10 defenceman has to be an exceptional skater to survive and the measurements say he is an average one — below the league in sprints and mileage, in the middle for top speed.

He is moved off pucks along the wall, does not clear his own net front and cannot play the body. The club protects him with the 74th-percentile zone starts and a third-pair role.

What this book would want to compare him to is Adam Fox, who is the same height and in the 4th percentile of speed and one of the best defencemen in the league. The difference is not physical and this book cannot measure it.

The Intangibles

Fifteenth overall in 2017 to Vegas, traded to Ottawa at nineteen in the Mark Stone deal, and 190 games across five seasons since.

49 points and four goals, on a club that has given him a fifth season to establish himself and has never given him more than sixteen minutes a night.

He is twenty-four. This book has a standing interest in small defencemen who dominate, and the honest reading is that he is the counter-example: the size is the same as Fox’s, the skating is not exceptional, and without one or the other there is no third route.

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
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
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.

playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“Everything here is the pass: he takes the puck off the wall, turns, and moves it, and sixteen assists from sixteen minutes a night is a real rate.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He is moved off pucks along the wall, does not clear his own net front and cannot play the body.”
edgespresent and ordinary· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“A 5-10 defenceman has to be an exceptional skater to survive and the measurements say he is an average one — below the league in sprints and mileage, in the middle for top speed.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,010 minutes

Expected goals: 54.2%; 82nd pct
Shot attempts: 55.3%; 91st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 39 for, 40 against. Expected: 44.5 and 37.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

9th

Numbers

82nd

The 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 55 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 · 74 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 69th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.51 a game
Distance: 2.37 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.0 mph; 56th 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 · 1010 minutes at five-on-five

Nick Holdenoff the roster44%
Thomas Chabot16%
Artem Zub13%

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 54.2% — 3.2 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 1,010 minutes at five-on-five — 58th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nick Holden	54.7%	53.7%	46.0%
Shane Pinto	53.4%	54.6%	48.9%
Drake Batherson	51.5%	55.2%	51.1%

54.7% together, 53.7% for him apart and 46.0% for Holden apart. Holden was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Holden than for him.

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

104 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 38 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 62% from beyond forty.