This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Ilya Lyubushkin

Undrafted out of Moscow, 279 NHL games as a shutdown defenceman, and the slowest man in the league.

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

2018-19	ARI	41	0	4	4	-9	13	0	0	0	27	0.0	13:44
2019-20	ARI	51	0	4	4	+4	18	0	0	0	41	0.0	14:11
2020-21	ARI	42	1	1	2	-13	10	0	0	0	36	2.8	15:42
2021-22	ARI/TOR	77	2	13	15	-2	51	0	0	0	54	3.7	17:27
2022-23	BUF	68	2	12	14	-2	38	0	1	1	41	4.9	15:01
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	279	5	34	39	-22	130	0	1	1	199	2.5	15:27

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 12 assists in 68 games for Buffalo — 14 points at 15:01 a night, minus-2, with a shorthanded goal on 41 shots and 38 penalty minutes.

46 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 881 minutes, the 27th percentile, on a club that gave up a great deal. His ice went 31-38 against an expectation of 35.68-41.84 — four fewer goals conceded than the chances predicted.

The Finesse Game

41 shots in 68 games, none of them from inside 20 feet, 75 per cent from beyond 40. Five goals in 279 career games. There is no offensive game here and he does not attempt one, which is at least honest.

The first pass is safe and short. Under a forecheck the puck goes off the glass, and a club that wants controlled exits will not get them from this pairing.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 206 and this is the whole player. He blocks shots, he finishes his check, and he defends the front of his net without needing to be told twice. 130 penalty minutes in 279 games is discipline for the style.

The skating is the worst measured on any regular in the league: 20.7 mph top end, the 1st percentile, and 0.1 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game, the 3rd. He survives because he plays a small area very well, and he is beaten in open ice by anybody who can turn.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Moscow, and 279 NHL games later he is a third-pair defenceman signed as a stopgap. Nothing about that was likely.

He is 29 and this is a stopgap signing on a club with young defencemen who are not ready. The value is that he takes the hardest defensive-zone minutes off the young defencemen until they are ready; the cost is that he cannot help the club skate.

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.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, out of Moscow, and 279 NHL games later he is a third-pair defenceman signed as a stopgap.”
shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it
“He blocks shots, he finishes his check, and he defends the front of his net without needing to be told twice.”
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He blocks shots, he finishes his check, and he defends the front of his net without needing to be told twice.”
transitionhe lacks it· carries it out; gains the line under control
“Under a forecheck the puck goes off the glass, and a club that wants controlled exits will not get them from this pairing.”
edgeshe lacks it· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“He survives because he plays a small area very well, and he is beaten in open ice by anybody who can turn.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 881 minutes

Expected goals: 46%; 27th pct
Shot attempts: 48%; 38th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 31 for, 38 against. Expected: 35.7 and 41.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

17th

Numbers

27th

The two rank him within 10 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 58 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 with BUF · 881 minutes at five-on-five

Jacob Bryson34%
Owen Power19%
Riley Stillmanoff the roster13%

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: BUF took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.0% — 3.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 881 minutes at five-on-five — 47th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jacob Bryson	41.5%	48.1%	50.1%
Casey Mittelstadt	46.6%	45.8%	50.2%
Dylan Cozens	46.0%	46.0%	50.8%

41.5% together, 48.1% for him apart and 50.1% for Bryson 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

48 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 44 feet. 2% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 75% from beyond forty.