This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Erik Karlsson

53 points and a minus-24, and the ice he was on scored 44 goals against an expectation of 64.89.

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

2009-10	OTT	60	5	21	26	-5	24	1	0	0	112	4.5	20:07
2010-11	OTT	75	13	32	45	-30	50	4	0	4	182	7.1	23:31
2011-12	OTT	81	19	59	78	+16	42	3	0	5	261	7.3	25:19
2012-13	OTT	17	6	8	14	+8	8	2	1	2	79	7.6	27:09
2013-14	OTT	82	20	54	74	-15	36	5	0	1	257	7.8	27:04
2014-15	OTT	82	21	45	66	+7	42	6	0	3	292	7.2	27:15
2015-16	OTT	82	16	66	82	-2	50	1	0	3	248	6.5	28:58
2016-17	OTT	77	17	54	71	+10	28	4	0	5	218	7.8	26:50
2017-18	OTT	71	9	53	62	-25	36	3	0	2	196	4.6	26:44
2018-19	SJS	53	3	42	45	+6	22	2	0	1	169	1.8	24:29
2019-20	SJS	56	6	34	40	-15	16	1	1	0	120	5.0	24:31
2020-21	SJS	52	8	14	22	-18	18	3	0	1	110	7.3	23:36
2021-22	SJS	50	10	25	35	-14	14	0	0	2	117	8.6	23:28
2022-23	SJS	82	25	76	101	-26	36	5	0	4	209	12.0	25:37
2023-24	PIT	82	11	45	56	+4	44	2	0	4	213	5.2	24:16
2024-25	PIT	82	11	42	53	-24	20	2	0	1	191	5.8	23:14
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	1084	200	670	870	-123	486	44	2	38	2974	6.7	25:13

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

11 goals and 42 assists in 82 games — 53 points at 23:14 a night, on 191 shots and 20 penalty minutes. Minus-24, the worst on the club.

48.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 33rd percentile, across 1,517 minutes — the most on the roster. His ice went 44-71 against an expectation of 64.89-69.76. Twenty-one goals of scoring did not arrive and one and a half more went in than the chances said should, and the second half of that sentence is the goaltending.

The Finesse Game

The skating is still the best of any defenceman in this book at 35. He escapes a forecheck by turning into it, he carries the puck the length of the ice when he decides to, and nobody closes on him.

191 attempts at a median of 49 feet with 70 per cent from beyond 40 — a point shot, and 11 goals from it. 42 assists is the real number and it comes from the walk along the blue line, which is the play the whole power play is built around.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 185 and among the lightest defencemen in the league playing twenty-three minutes a night. He does not clear a crease, he does not win a battle in the corner, and he is not going to start.

20 penalty minutes in 82 games. He defends by skating backwards faster than the forward skates forwards, and when that fails there is no second answer. On a club that conceded 276 goals, that is not a small thing.

The Intangibles

Fifteenth overall in 2008, three Norris Trophies fourteen years apart, and 1,084 games with 870 points — a scoring record for the position that only a handful of men have approached.

He is 35, on the largest contract on the roster, and he was acquired in 2023 to make a power play work. It is 5th in the league. Everything else has gone badly.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,517 minutes

Expected goals: 48.2%; 34th pct
Shot attempts: 51.6%; 70th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 44 for, 71 against. Expected: 64.9 and 69.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

60th

Numbers

34th

The report ranks him 26 points above where the numbers do. 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 74 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.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 1517 minutes at five-on-five

Matt Grzelcyknow CHI45%
Marcus Petterssonnow VAN30%

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, 2024-25

The club: PIT took 49.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.2% — 0.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,517 minutes at five-on-five — 99th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Matt Grzelcyk	45.0%	50.6%	48.2%
Sidney Crosby	52.1%	45.4%	50.5%
Rickard Rakell	52.3%	45.7%	50.8%

45.0% together, 50.6% for him apart and 48.2% for Grzelcyk apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

287 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 35 feet. 6% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 70% from beyond forty.