This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Evgeni Malkin

The most giveaways per 60 of all 393 forwards and the 4th-most takeaways, in forty-one games at 36.

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

2006-07	PIT	78	33	52	85	+2	80	16	0	6	242	13.6	19:10
2007-08	PIT	82	47	59	106	+16	78	17	0	5	272	17.3	21:19
2008-09	PIT	82	35	78	113	+17	80	14	2	4	290	12.1	22:31
2009-10	PIT	67	28	49	77	-6	100	13	2	7	268	10.4	20:51
2010-11	PIT	43	15	22	37	-4	18	5	0	3	182	8.2	19:49
2011-12	PIT	75	50	59	109	+18	70	12	0	9	339	14.8	21:01
2012-13	PIT	31	9	24	33	+5	36	4	0	3	99	9.1	19:42
2013-14	PIT	60	23	49	72	+10	62	7	0	3	191	12.0	20:04
2014-15	PIT	69	28	42	70	-2	60	9	0	4	212	13.2	18:58
2015-16	PIT	57	27	31	58	+1	65	11	0	6	162	16.7	19:22
2016-17	PIT	62	33	39	72	+18	77	11	0	6	191	17.3	18:37
2017-18	PIT	78	42	56	98	+16	87	14	0	7	239	17.6	18:59
2018-19	PIT	68	21	51	72	-25	89	9	0	5	187	11.2	18:48
2019-20	PIT	55	25	49	74	+7	58	7	0	5	171	14.6	19:31
2020-21	PIT	33	8	20	28	-4	24	4	0	0	72	11.1	17:44
2021-22	PIT	41	20	22	42	-10	24	9	0	5	129	15.5	18:20
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	981	444	702	1146	+59	1008	162	4	78	3246	13.7	19:51

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

41 games, 20 goals and 22 assists at 18:20 a night, minus-10, twenty-four penalty minutes, 129 shots. Nine of the twenty came on the power play. Sixteen seasons, 981 games and 1,146 points, all of it for one club, out of a second-overall pick in 2004.

The Finesse Game

3.83 giveaways per 60 is the most of all 393 forwards who played forty games. 3.27 takeaways per 60 is the 4th-most of the same 393.

Nobody else in the league is at both ends of that ledger. He touches the puck more than almost anyone and loses it more than anyone, and the two facts are the same fact.

10.30 shots per 60 is the 90th percentile at 15.5 per cent, the 84th — twenty goals in forty-one games is a forty-goal pace.

Three minutes and forty-six seconds of power play a night is the 98th percentile among forwards. Nine of his twenty goals came there.

55.2 per cent of the expected goals and 54.2 per cent of the attempts, out of 65.4 per cent offensive-zone starts — the 13th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts. Only twelve men in hockey started softer.

His ice went 23-29 against an expectation of 27.29-22.19 — four goals short in front and seven more against than the model asked, across half a season.

The Physical Game

1.68 hits per 60 is the 15th percentile at 6-5 and 213 pounds, and 1.44 blocks the 38th. 1.04 penalties drawn per 60 is the 75th percentile against 0.88 taken.

The tallest forward on this roster finishes fewer checks than all but fifteen per cent of the league. That has been true for years and it is not a new decline.

The Intangibles

21.5 mph is the 26th-slowest of the 365 forwards the tracking covers and 1.4 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 is the 18th-fewest.

And 10.13 miles per 60 is the 89th percentile. He covers an enormous amount of ground and almost none of it at speed — the clearest signature of a 36-year-old still playing eighteen minutes.

He is 36 and has played forty-one, thirty-three and fifty-five games in three of the last four seasons. The shooting rate, the power-play production and the takeaways all say the player is intact. The games played, the top speed and the sprint count say how the rest of it ends.

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.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

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.

sheltered· is started in the attacking end
65% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 97th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“Sixteen seasons, 981 games and 1,146 points, all of it for one club, out of a second-overall pick in 2004.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 564 minutes

Expected goals: 55.2%; 87th pct
Shot attempts: 54.2%; 85th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 23 for, 29 against. Expected: 27.3 and 22.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

96th

Numbers

87th

The two rank him within 9 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 75 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, 2021-22 · 41 games

Top speed: 21.5 mph; 24th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.41 a game
Distance: 3.09 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.1 mph; 77th 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

2021-22 · 564 minutes at five-on-five

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, 2021-22

The club: PIT took 53.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.2% — 1.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 564 minutes at five-on-five — 23rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Danton Heinen	61.3%	50.7%	56.4%
Mike Matheson	51.9%	57.5%	54.3%
John Marino	52.4%	56.6%	51.6%

61.3% together, 50.7% for him apart and 56.4% for Heinen 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

155 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 20 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 34% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 28% from beyond forty.