Erik Haula

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

14 goals and 27 assists in 80 games — 41 points — at 16:38 a night. Plus-13, 164 shots at 8.5 per cent, two shorthanded goals, 47 penalty minutes, and no game-winners at all.

56.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 92nd percentile, with his ice at 50-43 against an expectation of 53.42-41.25 — three goals short at the attacking end, which on a club twenty-fifth in finishing is the house pattern.

He started 51.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 56th percentile.

Ten seasons, 614 games, 281 points, and six organisations.

The Finesse Game

164 shots at a median of 22 feet, 46 per cent of them from inside twenty.

Inside twenty: 81 shots on goal and 10 goals — 12.35 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 49 shots, 3 goals.

That is a well below-average finisher from the only range he shoots from, and it has been true for most of a decade: 126 goals in 614 games at 8.5 per cent last season against a career rate barely different.

36 tip-ins out of 236 tracked attempts and 38 backhands, against eleven slap shots. He plays inside the dots and takes what deflects, which is where the goals he does score come from.

27 assists is the better half. He is a distributor on a scoring line and a net-front presence on a checking one, and the club has used him as both.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 191, with 47 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.0 mph, the 38th percentile; 0.8 bursts a game, the 46th; 2.58 miles a game, the 51st. The median of the league in every reading, at thirty-two.

He kills penalties, takes the defensive-zone draws on the second line, and finishes his checks without hurting anybody.

The two shorthanded goals are the honest measure of what he is now: a useful forward on both special teams whose even-strength scoring has to be carried by the men beside him.

The Intangibles

One hundred and eighty-second overall in 2009, which is the seventh round, and 614 games later he is in his tenth season and his sixth organisation.

The career high is the 55 points in Vegas in 2017-18 and nothing since has come close. What has stayed constant is that every club that has had him has used him on the penalty kill.

He is thirty-two on a team whose bottom six is its weakest part, and the file says he is exactly good enough to hold that job and not good enough to be moved up out of it.