This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Jesperi Kotkaniemi
Carolina Hurricanes Center
The third-overall pick Carolina forced Montreal to trade with an offer sheet, on twelve minutes a night and a 54.5 per cent chance share.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | MTL | 79 | 11 | 23 | 34 | +1 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 134 | 8.2 | 13:44 |
| 2019-20 | MTL | 36 | 6 | 2 | 8 | -11 | 23 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 55 | 10.9 | 13:00 |
| 2020-21 | MTL | 56 | 5 | 15 | 20 | -1 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 87 | 5.8 | 14:48 |
| 2021-22 | CAR | 66 | 12 | 17 | 29 | +3 | 37 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 81 | 14.8 | 12:01 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 237 | 34 | 57 | 91 | -8 | 98 | 2 | 0 | 6 | 357 | 9.5 | 13:24 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
12 goals and 17 assists in 66 games — 29 points at 12:01 a night, plus-3, with 3 game-winners on 81 shots and 37 penalty minutes.
Twelve minutes a night is a fourth-line shift, and 29 points off it is a better return than the ice time deserves.
54.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 723 minutes, the 84th percentile. His ice went 33-28 against an expectation of 34.18-28.49 — both ends within a goal of what the chances predicted.
47.3 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the offensive zone, the 99th percentile among forwards. He was sheltered, thoroughly, and did what a sheltered fourth-line centre is supposed to do with it.
The Finesse Game
81 attempts at a median of 21 feet with 45 per cent from inside the slot, converting at 14.8 per cent. Twelve goals off eighty-one shots is a rate nobody sustains and the locations are at least the right ones.
91 points in 237 career games from a third-overall pick in his fourth season. That is the number Montreal looked at, and it is the number Carolina is betting against.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 212, and the puck is difficult to take off him below the goal line. 37 penalty minutes in 66 games says he engages.
Top speed 21.9 mph at the 28th percentile and 1.98 miles a game at the 12th. The feet are ordinary and the ground covered is a function of twelve minutes, so neither figure should be read hard.
The Intangibles
Third overall in 2018 by Montreal, and traded to Carolina in the most talked-about offer sheet of the decade — Carolina signed him, Montreal declined to match, and Carolina paid a first and a third for a twenty-one-year-old who had just played in a Stanley Cup final and scored 20 points in his fourth season.
He is 22, on an eight-year contract signed in the summer. Carolina has now paid two picks and a long-term deal for a fourth-line centre with 91 points in 237 games, and the entire justification is the 84th-percentile chance share and the fact that he is twenty-two.
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
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.
“6-3 and 212, and the puck is difficult to take off him below the goal line”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 723 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.5%
- 84th pct
- Shot attempts
- 58.9%
- 99th 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: 33 for, 28 against. Expected: 34.2 and 28.5.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 26 points above where the report does. 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 62 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, 2021-22 · 66 games
- Top speed
- 21.9 mph
- 39th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.62 a game
- Distance
- 1.98 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.3 mph
- 51st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.1
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
2021-22 · 723 minutes at five-on-five
- Martin Necas31%
- Derek Stepan31%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- CAR took 55.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.5% — 0.7 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 723 minutes at five-on-five — 35th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ian Cole | 55.0% | 54.3% | 57.5% |
| Martin Necas | 50.0% | 56.7% | 50.5% |
| Derek Stepan | 56.9% | 53.6% | 56.8% |
55.0% together, 54.3% for him apart and 57.5% for Cole 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
109 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 12 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 46% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.