This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Ethan Bear
Washington Capitals Defense
Five foot eleven and two hundred and nineteen pounds, and one goal from forty-six point shots.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | EDM | 18 | 1 | 3 | 4 | -11 | 10 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 5.0 | 18:38 |
| 2019-20 | EDM | 71 | 5 | 16 | 21 | -4 | 33 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 99 | 5.1 | 21:58 |
| 2020-21 | EDM | 43 | 2 | 6 | 8 | -1 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 53 | 3.8 | 17:58 |
| 2021-22 | CAR | 58 | 5 | 9 | 14 | +1 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 97 | 5.1 | 16:05 |
| 2022-23 | VAN | 61 | 3 | 13 | 16 | +6 | 25 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 75 | 4.0 | 18:32 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 251 | 16 | 47 | 63 | -9 | 102 | 2 | 0 | 5 | 344 | 4.7 | 18:51 |
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
3 goals and 13 assists in 61 games — 16 points — at 18:32 a night for Vancouver. Plus-6, 75 shots at 4.0 per cent, 25 penalty minutes.
50.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 985 minutes, the 46th percentile, with his ice at 41-40 against an expectation of 38.02-37.89 — the goals matched the chances at both ends almost exactly.
He started 51.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 54th percentile.
A dead-even chance share out of even starts, on a club that finished twenty-fourth in chances, is a genuinely good third-pair season and it is why a fourth club has now signed him.
The Finesse Game
75 shots at a median of 50 feet, with 68 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 6 per cent from inside twenty.
Beyond forty feet: 46 shots on goal and one goal — 2.17 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 21 shots and two goals, 9.52 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: five shots and none.
106 tracked attempts, 29 of them slap shots — a 27.4 per cent share — and a shot measured at 89.3 mph, the 40th percentile.
16 goals and 47 assists in 251 career games at 4.7 per cent.
The passing is the reason he keeps being signed, and 47 assists in 251 games from a right-handed defenceman who has never played a full season on one roster is a reasonable rate.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 219 pounds, which is a startling shape for a defenceman — shorter than most forwards and heavier than most defencemen — with 25 penalty minutes in 61 games and 102 in 251 career games.
Top speed 22.0 mph at the 38th percentile, 0.7 bursts above twenty a game at the 37th, 2.57 miles a game at the 51st. Average on all three.
He is very hard to knock off a puck at that weight and that centre of gravity, and it is the reason he can defend a net front despite being under six feet.
He wins pucks along the wall by getting underneath people, which is a small man’s skill executed by a heavy one.
The reach is the limit. He cannot take a puck off a stick from distance and has to close on it instead, and against a good rush that is a losing arrangement.
The Intangibles
A hundred and twenty-fourth overall in 2015, the fifth round, five seasons, 251 games, 63 points across Edmonton, Carolina, Vancouver and Washington.
16 goals and 47 assists, and a minus-9.
He is twenty-six, on his fourth club in four seasons, and he is a right-handed defenceman who can hold an even chance share against even starts.
That description is worth more than four moves in four years suggests it is. A fifth-round pick who is a functional NHL third-pair defenceman at twenty-six has already outperformed his selection, and the reason he keeps moving is the reach rather than the results.
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
- 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.
“He is very hard to knock off a puck at that weight and that centre of gravity, and it is the reason he can defend a net front despite being under six feet.”
“He wins pucks along the wall by getting underneath people, which is a small man's skill executed by a heavy one.”
“He cannot take a puck off a stick from distance and has to close on it instead, and against a good rush that is a losing arrangement.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 985 minutes
- Expected goals
- 50.1%
- 54th pct
- Shot attempts
- 50.3%
- 55th 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, 40 against. Expected: 38.0 and 37.9.
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 — 68 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
- 22.0 mph
- 67th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.70 a game
- Distance
- 2.57 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.3 mph
- 36th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
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 with VAN · 985 minutes at five-on-five
- Quinn Hughes37%
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
- VAN took 47.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.1% — 3.1 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 985 minutes at five-on-five — 57th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quinn Hughes | 53.8% | 48.0% | 48.9% |
| J.T. Miller | 52.6% | 49.0% | 45.6% |
| Brock Boeser | 46.1% | 51.7% | 43.8% |
53.8% together, 48.0% for him apart and 48.9% for Hughes 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
103 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 30 feet. 11% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 65% from beyond forty.