This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Joel Armia
Montreal Canadiens Right Wing
Six foot three, a first-round pick, and his ice scored twelve goals in forty-three games.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | BUF | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 14:47 |
| 2015-16 | WPG | 43 | 4 | 6 | 10 | +2 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 52 | 7.7 | 12:10 |
| 2016-17 | WPG | 57 | 10 | 9 | 19 | -8 | 20 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 111 | 9.0 | 15:08 |
| 2017-18 | WPG | 79 | 12 | 17 | 29 | +3 | 22 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 128 | 9.4 | 12:36 |
| 2018-19 | MTL | 57 | 13 | 10 | 23 | 0 | 14 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 134 | 9.7 | 15:48 |
| 2019-20 | MTL | 58 | 16 | 14 | 30 | +2 | 28 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 155 | 10.3 | 17:14 |
| 2020-21 | MTL | 41 | 7 | 7 | 14 | +10 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 73 | 9.6 | 14:42 |
| 2021-22 | MTL | 60 | 6 | 8 | 14 | -15 | 14 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 103 | 5.8 | 13:43 |
| 2022-23 | MTL | 43 | 7 | 7 | 14 | -7 | 22 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 69 | 10.1 | 14:57 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 439 | 75 | 78 | 153 | -13 | 142 | 7 | 12 | 8 | 825 | 9.1 | 14:30 |
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
7 goals and 7 assists in 43 games — 14 points — at 14:57 a night. Minus-7, 69 shots at 10.1 per cent, 22 penalty minutes.
42.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 11th percentile, with his ice at 12-23 against an expectation of 18.04-24.00. Twelve goals for across 510 minutes is the lowest on-ice scoring rate of any Montreal forward, and six short of what the chances predicted.
He has now had three straight seasons of fourteen points or fewer.
Nine seasons, 439 games, 153 points.
The Finesse Game
69 shots at a median of 25 feet, 43 per cent from inside twenty and 24 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 17 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 49 shots, 7 goals, 14.29 per cent.
14.29 per cent from inside forty is a perfectly respectable rate, and sixty-nine shots in forty-three games is a low volume. The problem is not the finishing; it is that he does not shoot.
91.3 mph at the 53rd percentile, on three slap shots.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 215, and 22 penalty minutes in 43 games.
Top speed 21.9 mph, the 31st percentile; bursts 0.8 a game, the 46th; 2.35 miles a game, the 35th. Slow across the board.
He is big enough to hold a puck on the wall and does it well; what he does not do is finish a check or drive the net, and a sixteenth-overall pick who plays fifteen minutes at 6-3 without doing either is the definition of unfulfilled.
46.2 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 31st percentile — a hard share, and it explains part of the 11th percentile.
The Intangibles
Sixteenth overall in 2011 to Buffalo, one game there, three seasons in Winnipeg, and five in Montreal.
He is thirty and has missed at least twenty games in four of the last five seasons.
The penalty kill is where the club uses him and it is where his value is. Thirty-nine games of fourteen points from a fifteen-minute winger is not a season a rebuilding club needs to repeat.
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.
“He is big enough to hold a puck on the wall and does it well; what he does not do is finish a check or drive the net, and a sixteenth-overall pick who plays fifteen minutes at 6-3 without doing either is the definition of unfulfilled.”
“The penalty kill is where the club uses him and it is where his value is.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 510 minutes
- Expected goals
- 42.9%
- 11th pct
- Shot attempts
- 45.7%
- 20th 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: 12 for, 23 against. Expected: 18.0 and 24.0.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 18 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 — 61 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 · 43 games
- Top speed
- 21.9 mph
- 40th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.84 a game
- Distance
- 2.35 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 91.3 mph
- 74th 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 84.9
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 · 510 minutes at five-on-five
- Jake Evans30%
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
- MTL took 44.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.9% — 1.1 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 510 minutes at five-on-five — 17th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joel Edmundson | 41.4% | 43.7% | 42.7% |
| Jake Evans | 51.1% | 39.4% | 44.3% |
| Johnathan Kovacevic | 37.3% | 45.0% | 48.7% |
41.4% together, 43.7% for him apart and 42.7% for Edmundson 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
96 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 7 of them goals. His median goal came from 25 feet. 43% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 24% from beyond forty.