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

Jesper Bratt

A sixth-round pick, five-foot-ten, in the 96th percentile of measured speed and scoring from the mid-slot at half again the league's rate.

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

2017-18	NJD	74	13	22	35	-16	18	4	1	2	100	13.0	15:15
2018-19	NJD	51	8	25	33	-8	6	1	0	1	91	8.8	15:10
2019-20	NJD	60	16	16	32	-6	6	1	0	2	101	15.8	13:59
2020-21	NJD	46	7	23	30	+4	8	2	0	1	101	6.9	16:05
2021-22	NJD	76	26	47	73	0	16	3	0	6	197	13.2	17:26
2022-23	NJD	82	32	41	73	+14	6	8	0	3	212	15.1	17:22
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	389	102	174	276	-12	60	19	1	15	802	12.7	16:01

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

32 goals and 41 assists in 82 games — 73 points — at 17:22 a night. Plus-14, 212 shots at 15.1 per cent, six on the power play, six penalty minutes.

58.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 96th percentile, and 58.5 per cent of the attempts as well — the two agree exactly, which means the chances his ice produced were of ordinary quality in extraordinary quantity.

His ice finished 63-48 against an expectation of 64.08-45.37. He started 59 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone, the 87th percentile, 416 attacking draws against 289.

Six seasons, 389 games, 276 points, all of them in New Jersey, off a sixth-round pick.

The Finesse Game

212 shots at a median of 27 feet.

From twenty to forty feet: 102 shots on goal and 16 goals — 15.69 per cent, against a league forward rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 82 shots and 13 goals, 15.85 per cent, against a league rate of 17.71.

Read those side by side. His close-range rate is below the league’s and his mid-range rate is half again above it, and the two are within two-tenths of a point of each other — the distance he shoots from barely changes what happens next. That is not the ordinary shape, and it is worth more than the goal total.

The mechanism is the release. 130 wrist shots and 79 snap out of 303 tracked attempts, only 28 slap shots, and a measured 87.3 mph at the 25th percentile that reads as a man who never winds up rather than one who cannot.

41 assists, and 174 in his career against 102 goals. The pass is the first option and always has been.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 175 pounds, with six penalty minutes in eighty-two games.

Top speed 23.4 mph, the 96th percentile. 2.8 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 95th. 2.88 miles a game, the 73rd.

So: near the top of the league in outright speed and in how often he reaches for it, and merely good in ground covered. That is a winger who attacks in straight lines from a standing start rather than one who skates all night.

He does not take the body and cannot be asked to. At 175 pounds he is moved off pucks along the wall, and the way he plays around it is never to be standing still where a defenceman can reach him.

The Intangibles

One hundred and sixty-second overall in 2016, which is the sixth round, and 389 games later he is a seventy-three-point winger who has never played for anybody else.

The career line is 102 goals and 174 assists, and the shape has been the same at every stage: a shooter who would rather pass, on a club that for most of his time here had nobody to pass to.

He is twenty-five, and the tracking says the speed is at its peak now. What this book cannot say is how a 175-pound winger’s game ages when that goes, because the same measurements do not exist for the men who came before him.

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
0.07 penalty minutes a game over 82, 3rd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“The pass is the first option and always has been.”
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“That is a winger who attacks in straight lines from a standing start rather than one who skates all night.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“At 175 pounds he is moved off pucks along the wall, and the way he plays around it is never to be standing still where a defenceman can reach him.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,117 minutes

Expected goals: 58.5%; 96th pct
Shot attempts: 58.5%; 96th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 63 for, 48 against. Expected: 64.1 and 45.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

83rd

Numbers

96th

The two rank him within 13 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 — 74 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 23.4 mph; 97th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.76 a game
Distance: 2.88 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.3 mph; 50th 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 · 1117 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: NJD took 56.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 58.5% — 2.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,117 minutes at five-on-five — 74th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jack Hughes	62.4%	54.2%	53.1%
Nico Hischier	57.2%	59.5%	61.2%
Dougie Hamilton	58.1%	58.8%	54.9%

62.4% together, 54.2% for him apart and 53.1% for Hughes apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

305 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 31 of them goals. His median goal came from 25 feet. 36% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 15% from beyond forty.