This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →

Jakub Vrana

Eleven goals in twenty-five games, and thirty-seven per cent from inside twenty feet.

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

2016-17	WSH	21	3	3	6	+2	2	3	0	2	32	9.4	11:07
2017-18	WSH	73	13	14	27	+2	12	1	0	2	133	9.8	12:30
2018-19	WSH	82	24	23	47	+20	27	1	0	4	161	14.9	14:02
2019-20	WSH	69	25	27	52	+3	18	1	0	6	187	13.4	14:53
2020-21	WSH/DET	50	19	17	36	+10	10	0	0	7	100	19.0	15:00
2021-22	DET	26	13	6	19	-8	16	5	0	3	65	20.0	14:56
2022-23	DET/STL	25	11	5	16	+3	10	4	0	2	63	17.5	14:33
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	346	108	95	203	+32	95	15	0	26	741	14.6	13:57

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

11 goals and 5 assists in 25 games — 16 points — at 14:33 a night between Detroit and St. Louis. Plus-3, 63 shots at 17.5 per cent, four on the power play, two game-winners, 10 penalty minutes.

Eleven goals in twenty-five games is a thirty-six-goal pace, and twenty-five games is the shortest season of a seven-year career.

43.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 303 minutes, the 9th percentile, with his ice at 14-10 against an expectation of 12.24-15.89.

He started 49.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 44th percentile. Three hundred and three minutes is a fortnight and nothing in the underlying record should be read from it.

The Finesse Game

63 shots at a median of 29 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 19 shots on goal and seven goals — 36.84 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 33 shots and three goals, 9.09 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 12 shots and one goal.

Seven from nineteen is the sort of run that produces an eleven-goal quarter-season and does not survive a full one. But the career figure is the interesting number: 14.6 per cent across 741 shots and 346 games, with 108 goals, which is a genuinely high rate sustained over seven years.

86 tracked attempts, ten of them slap shots and 20 snap. 94.3 mph at the 74th percentile.

The release is the asset and always has been. He shoots in stride off the entry, and a 13th-overall pick with 108 goals in 346 games is a finisher by any measure this book has.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 197 pounds, and 2.1 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 87th percentile, at a top speed of 22.5 mph, the 61st, on 2.35 miles a game at the 35th.

A genuinely quick winger over short distances. The speed and the release are the whole of the offensive file and they are both real.

10 penalty minutes in 25 games and 95 in 346 career games. He is not a physical player and does not defend, and a 9th-percentile chance share on 303 minutes, while too small to conclude from, points the same way every previous season has.

That is the standing objection to him and it has followed him across two clubs.

The Intangibles

Thirteenth overall in 2014, seven seasons, 346 games, 203 points across Washington and Detroit, and a Stanley Cup in 2018.

108 goals at a 14.6 per cent career rate. The 25-goal season in 2019-20 and the 24 in 2018-19 are the peaks, and he has not played sixty games in a season since.

He is twenty-seven, arriving on a rebuilding club that needs somebody to shoot. The finishing is real, the availability is not, and the defensive record is the reason two clubs have moved on.

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.

transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He shoots in stride off the entry, and a 13th-overall pick with 108 goals in 346 games is a finisher by any measure this book has.”
defensively-responsiblehe lacks it· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“He is not a physical player and does not defend, and a 9th-percentile chance share on 303 minutes, while too small to conclude from, points the same way every previous season has.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 303 minutes

Expected goals: 43.5%; 13th pct
Shot attempts: 44.3%; 13th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 14 for, 10 against. Expected: 12.2 and 15.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

58th

Numbers

13th

The report ranks him 45 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 — 67 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 · 25 games

Top speed: 22.5 mph; 67th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.12 a game
Distance: 2.35 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.3 mph; 89th 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 · 252 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, 2022-23

The club: STL took 45.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.5% — 2.3 below the club he did it on.
The role: 303 minutes at five-on-five — 6th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Brayden Schenn	36.3%	47.7%	44.7%
Justin Faulk	45.5%	42.5%	43.6%
Kasperi Kapanen	48.3%	41.0%	43.5%

36.3% together, 47.7% for him apart and 44.7% for Schenn 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

86 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 11 feet. 26% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.