This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

Jeff Skinner

Thirty-five goals at the ninth percentile in top speed, all of them from inside twenty feet.

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

2010-11	CAR	82	31	32	63	+3	46	6	0	2	215	14.4	16:44
2011-12	CAR	64	20	24	44	-8	56	4	0	5	210	9.5	18:37
2012-13	CAR	42	13	11	24	-21	26	5	0	0	159	8.2	18:28
2013-14	CAR	71	33	21	54	-14	22	11	0	6	274	12.0	17:12
2014-15	CAR	77	18	13	31	-24	18	4	0	2	235	7.7	16:03
2015-16	CAR	82	28	23	51	-2	38	4	0	7	258	10.8	16:17
2016-17	CAR	79	37	26	63	-3	28	7	0	4	281	13.2	17:44
2017-18	CAR	82	24	25	49	-27	34	4	0	2	277	8.7	16:42
2018-19	BUF	82	40	23	63	0	36	8	0	7	268	14.9	18:31
2019-20	BUF	59	14	9	23	-22	18	0	0	1	183	7.6	16:29
2020-21	BUF	53	7	7	14	-11	14	1	0	0	111	6.3	14:31
2021-22	BUF	80	33	30	63	-14	42	5	0	4	262	12.6	17:06
2022-23	BUF	79	35	47	82	+15	39	8	0	3	242	14.5	17:24
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	932	333	291	624	-128	417	67	0	43	2975	11.2	17:04

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

35 goals and 47 assists in 79 games — 82 points, a career high, at 17:24 a night, plus-15, with 8 power-play goals on 242 shots, converting at 14.46 per cent, and 39 penalty minutes.

52.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,087 minutes, the 70th percentile. His ice went 80-59 against an expectation of 60.72-54.99 — nineteen goals of scoring above what the chances predicted, which is the largest overperformance on the roster and the number to hold against the 82 points.

It is the second good season after two that were bad enough to make his contract a national joke.

The Finesse Game

242 attempts at a median of 19 feet, with 52 per cent from inside 20 and only 14 per cent from beyond 40.

333 career goals, and the mechanism has never changed: he goes to the paint, he waits, and he puts it in from there. The hands in tight are among the best in the league and the release from a standstill in traffic is the specific skill. The shot is hard enough at 93.6 mph but the velocity is not why it goes in.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 200, and he does not play a physical game — 417 penalty minutes in 932 games, most of that accumulated years ago.

The tracking is startling: 21.3 mph top end is the 9th percentile and 0.3 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game is the 10th. He is among the slowest forwards in the league by measurement and he scored 35 goals. The scoring does not come from getting there first; it comes from being in the right place and being impossible to move out of it once he is.

The Intangibles

Seventh overall in 2010, Calder Trophy at eighteen, thirteen seasons, 932 games and 624 points.

He is 31, on a long contract that was for a long time the most criticised in the league. Two good seasons have made it defensible again, and the tracking is the reason to be careful: a 31-year-old scoring winger at the 9th percentile in foot speed has very little margin when the hands go.

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.

durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
63% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 93rd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“he goes to the paint, he waits, and he puts it in from there”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“The scoring does not come from getting there first; it comes from being in the right place and being impossible to move out of it once he is.”
punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“he does not play a physical game — 417 penalty minutes in 932 games, most of that accumulated years ago”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,087 minutes

Expected goals: 52.5%; 71st pct
Shot attempts: 54.4%; 87th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 80 for, 59 against. Expected: 60.7 and 55.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

66th

Numbers

71st

The two rank him within 5 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 120 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 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 · 1087 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: BUF took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.5% — 2.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,087 minutes at five-on-five — 68th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Tage Thompson	52.0%	54.1%	46.6%
Alex Tuch	53.8%	49.1%	47.1%
Rasmus Dahlin	55.7%	49.8%	52.3%

52.0% together, 54.1% for him apart and 46.6% for Thompson apart. Thompson was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Thompson than for him.

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

325 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 35 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 52% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.