This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Jan Rutta
San Jose Sharks Defense
Fifty-four shots on goal from beyond forty feet and not one from inside twenty.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | CHI | 57 | 6 | 14 | 20 | -1 | 24 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 71 | 8.5 | 19:15 |
| 2018-19 | CHI/TBL | 37 | 2 | 6 | 8 | +4 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 42 | 4.8 | 15:36 |
| 2019-20 | TBL | 33 | 1 | 6 | 7 | +6 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 43 | 2.3 | 15:33 |
| 2020-21 | TBL | 35 | 0 | 8 | 8 | +12 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 46 | 0.0 | 16:02 |
| 2021-22 | TBL | 76 | 3 | 15 | 18 | +25 | 47 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 86 | 3.5 | 16:23 |
| 2022-23 | PIT | 56 | 3 | 6 | 9 | +3 | 30 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 64 | 4.7 | 17:07 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 294 | 15 | 55 | 70 | +49 | 153 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 352 | 4.3 | 16:51 |
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 6 assists in 56 games — 9 points — at 17:07 a night for Pittsburgh. Plus-3, 64 shots at 4.7 per cent, 30 penalty minutes, no power-play points.
49.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 816 minutes, the 41st percentile, with his ice at 28-32 against an expectation of 31.93-32.70.
He started 42.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 19th percentile.
A plus-3 on a club that missed the playoffs, and a plus-49 for a career, on a defenceman who has never scored more than six goals in a season.
The Finesse Game
64 shots at a median of 54 feet, with 78 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.
Beyond forty feet: 54 shots on goal and three goals — 5.56 per cent, well above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: seven shots and none. Inside twenty: no shots on goal at all.
Not one shot on goal from inside twenty feet in fifty-six games. That is the most extreme shot distribution of any defenceman in this chapter and one of the most extreme in the book: he shoots from the point or he does not shoot.
90 tracked attempts, 21 of them slap shots — a 23.3 per cent share, the highest on this blue line — and the return from range was 5.56 per cent, comfortably above the positional rate. That is the case for the point shot rather than against it, and it sits on the same blue line as Marc-Edouard Vlasic, whose 22.8 per cent returned nothing from forty attempts. Which is the finding: the share does not predict the return in either direction.
94.4 mph at the 74th percentile.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 204 pounds. Top speed 21.4 mph, the 11th percentile, with 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 28th and 2.29 miles a game at the 32nd.
He is slow and knows it, and the game is built accordingly: inside position, stick in the lane, and no attempt whatever to recover from a bad gap because there is nothing to recover with.
30 penalty minutes in 56 games and 153 in 294 career games. He defends the front of his net with his body and is willing to be unpleasant about it.
At 6-3 he clears the crease competently, which alongside the plus-49 is most of the reason four clubs have found room for a man who cannot skate.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, six seasons, 294 games, 70 points, and two Stanley Cups in Tampa Bay.
He arrived in the NHL at twenty-seven after a career in the Czech league, played 57 games in Chicago, and has been a third-pair defenceman on good teams ever since.
The plus-49 is the number a club buys and it should be discounted heavily: four of his six seasons were spent in Tampa Bay while that club was winning two championships. What is left after the discount is a slow, positionally sound, physically willing defenceman who does exactly one thing with the puck.
He is thirty-three, and San Jose has signed him to be the veteran on a blue line that has just lost Erik Karlsson.
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.
- perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
86.2% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 99th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
- hard-shot· beats a goaltender from range
3 of 75 attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 4.0%, 91st percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.21) · 16% keep it
“He arrived in the NHL at twenty-seven after a career in the Czech league, played 57 games in Chicago, and has been a third-pair defenceman on good teams ever since.”
“At 6-3 he clears the crease competently, which alongside the plus-49 is most of the reason four clubs have found room for a man who cannot skate.”
“He defends the front of his net with his body and is willing to be unpleasant about it.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 816 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.4%
- 47th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.7%
- 43rd 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: 28 for, 32 against. Expected: 31.9 and 32.7.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 4 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 — 64 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 · 56 games
- Top speed
- 21.4 mph
- 43rd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.57 a game
- Distance
- 2.29 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 94.4 mph
- 66th 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 PIT · 816 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
- PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.4% — 3.6 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 816 minutes at five-on-five — 40th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brian Dumoulin | 42.0% | 54.0% | 52.8% |
| Evgeni Malkin | 54.6% | 47.1% | 54.9% |
| Jason Zucker | 56.2% | 46.6% | 55.3% |
42.0% together, 54.0% for him apart and 52.8% for Dumoulin 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
87 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 54 feet. 1% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 86% from beyond forty.