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

Jake Sanderson

Seventy-seven games at twenty, twenty-two minutes a night, and the 95th percentile of measured top speed.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI
2022-23	OTT	77	4	28	32	-6	12	2	0	0	132	3.0	21:55
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	77	4	28	32	-6	12	2	0	0	132	3.0	21:55

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

4 goals and 28 assists in 77 games — 32 points — at 21:55 a night, in a first NHL season, at twenty. Minus-6, 132 shots, twelve penalty minutes.

1,223 five-on-five minutes from a rookie defenceman is a very large number and the club did not soften it.

50.2 per cent of the expected goals, the 53rd percentile, with his ice at 46-55 against an expectation of 50.59-50.27 — five short at the attacking end and five past at the defensive, on a club that finished thirtieth in finishing and twenty-seventh in goaltending.

He started 46.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 31st percentile: 347 attacking draws against 404. A rookie given the second-hardest deployment on the blue line and a chance share above fifty out of it is the most encouraging line in this chapter.

One season, 77 games, 32 points.

The Finesse Game

132 shots at a median of 49 feet, and four goals.

Beyond forty: 71 shots on goal and 3 goals, 4.23 per cent, above the positional rate of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 44 shots and 1 goal. Inside twenty: twelve shots and none.

Four goals on 132 shots is a rookie defenceman’s line and there is nothing to read in it either way.

112 wrist shots and 39 slap out of 192 tracked attempts. 95.6 mph at the 82nd percentile, on that slap count, so the shot is genuinely hard.

28 assists in a first season. The first pass is already professional and it is the half of the file that will decide how good he becomes.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 202, with twelve penalty minutes in seventy-seven games.

Top speed 23.4 mph, the 95th percentile; 1.7 bursts a game, the 79th; 3.12 miles a game, the 86th. Top fifth of the league in all three, in a rookie season, at twenty.

That is a defenceman who can skate with anybody in the league and it is the reason a first-year player was given twenty-two minutes a night against the hard end of the rink.

He defends by closing gaps early and turning pucks up ice himself, and twelve penalty minutes across a full season says he is almost never beaten badly enough to need to foul.

What is not there is weight. At 202 pounds he is moved off the front of his own net and does not clear it, and the club paired him with Hamonic for exactly that reason.

The Intangibles

Fifth overall in 2020, two seasons at North Dakota, and a first NHL year of seventy-seven games and twenty-two minutes.

Thirty-two points and a minus-6 on a club that was minus-10 in goal difference, from the second-hardest zone starts on its blue line.

He is twenty-one. Nothing in this book’s measurements suggests a ceiling: the skating is in the top five per cent of the league, the passing is already there, and the only thing missing is the eighteen months of strength that arrive on their own.

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
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.

disciplined· stays out of the box
0.16 penalty minutes a game over 77, 3rd percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“That is a defenceman who can skate with anybody in the league and it is the reason a first-year player was given twenty-two minutes a night against the hard end of the rink.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“The first pass is already professional and it is the half of the file that will decide how good he becomes.”
defensively-responsiblea strength· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“He defends by closing gaps early and turning pucks up ice himself, and twelve penalty minutes across a full season says he is almost never beaten badly enough to need to foul.”
clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net
“At 202 pounds he is moved off the front of his own net and does not clear it, and the club paired him with Hamonic for exactly that reason.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,223 minutes

Expected goals: 50.2%; 55th pct
Shot attempts: 51.7%; 68th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 46 for, 55 against. Expected: 50.6 and 50.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

80th

Numbers

55th

The report ranks him 25 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 73 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 · 77 games

Top speed: 23.4 mph; 98th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.69 a game
Distance: 3.12 miles a game
Hardest shot: 95.6 mph; 74th 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

2022-23 · 1223 minutes at five-on-five

Travis Hamonic63%
Artem Zub19%

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: OTT took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.2% — 0.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,223 minutes at five-on-five — 85th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Travis Hamonic	49.3%	51.8%	48.4%
Claude Giroux	55.0%	47.3%	54.6%
Tim Stützle	52.3%	48.9%	55.1%

49.3% together, 51.8% for him apart and 48.4% for Hamonic apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

183 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 56 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 60% from beyond forty.