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

Joel Edmundson

Twenty-three more goals allowed than the chances called for, and one goal from forty-eight point shots at 101 mph.

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

2015-16	STL	67	1	8	9	0	63	0	0	0	90	1.1	14:56
2016-17	STL	69	3	12	15	+11	60	0	0	1	81	3.7	17:46
2017-18	STL	69	7	10	17	-1	57	0	0	0	124	5.7	20:44
2018-19	STL	64	2	9	11	+8	68	0	0	1	102	2.0	19:23
2019-20	CAR	68	7	13	20	+7	72	0	0	0	97	7.2	18:27
2020-21	MTL	55	3	10	13	+28	25	0	0	0	77	3.9	20:03
2021-22	MTL	24	3	3	6	-1	35	0	0	0	32	9.4	19:35
2022-23	MTL	61	2	11	13	-29	58	0	0	0	69	2.9	19:34
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	477	28	76	104	+23	438	0	0	2	672	4.2	18:42

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

2 goals and 11 assists in 61 games — 13 points — at 19:34 a night for Montreal. Minus-29, 69 shots at 2.9 per cent, 58 penalty minutes.

42.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 6th percentile, across 963 minutes, with his ice at 36-71 against an expectation of 35.28-47.81.

Seventy-one goals allowed against forty-eight expected. That is twenty-three more than the chances called for, and the third-largest such gap of the 525 skaters in this book’s pool.

He started 47.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 34th percentile, so the deployment accounts for some of the 6th percentile and none of the twenty-three.

Montreal finished thirtieth in even-strength chance share, which is the context, and 963 minutes is enough that it is his season too.

The Finesse Game

69 shots at a median of 54 feet, with 71 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 48 shots on goal and one goal — 2.08 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 11 shots and none. Inside twenty: eight shots and one goal.

92 tracked attempts, 43 of them slap shots — a 46.7 per cent share, the highest of any defenceman on this roster and one of the highest in the book — and a shot measured at 101.3 mph, the 99th percentile and the seventh-hardest in this edition.

Forty-eight shots on goal from the point at a hundred and one miles an hour, for one goal. He is the purest version of the profile the point-shot argument describes, and the return is a single goal.

28 goals in 477 career games at 4.2 per cent.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 220 pounds, with 58 penalty minutes in 61 games and 438 in 477 career games — close to a penalty minute a game across eight seasons.

Top speed 21.8 mph at the 27th percentile, 0.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 15th, 2.55 miles a game at the 47th. Slow, and covering ordinary ground.

He is punishing and he clears his crease by force, which at 6-5 is the reason clubs keep giving him twenty minutes a night.

He blocks shots, and that willingness is not in question either.

The feet are, and the twenty-three goals are what happens when a slow defenceman is beaten wide repeatedly on a club that cannot help him.

The Intangibles

Forty-sixth overall in 2011, the second round, eight seasons, 477 games, 104 points across St. Louis, Carolina and Montreal, and a Stanley Cup in 2019.

28 goals and 76 assists, and a plus-23 across a career of which last season’s minus-29 is by far the worst.

He is thirty, joining a club that finished twentieth in chances and needs somebody to defend its net front.

The file is honestly split and the split matters. He is a genuinely useful physical defenceman on a good team and a liability on a bad one, and Washington is somewhere in between. The 6th percentile is the warning; the two Stanley Cup Final runs in St. Louis and Montreal are the other half.

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
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.

punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is punishing and he clears his crease by force, which at 6-5 is the reason clubs keep giving him twenty minutes a night.”
shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it
“He blocks shots, and that willingness is not in question either.”
edgeshe lacks it· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“The feet are, and the twenty-three goals are what happens when a slow defenceman is beaten wide repeatedly on a club that cannot help him.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 963 minutes

Expected goals: 42.5%; 10th pct
Shot attempts: 43%; 9th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 71 against. Expected: 35.3 and 47.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

20th

Numbers

10th

The two rank him within 10 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 — 59 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 · 61 games

Top speed: 21.8 mph; 59th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.34 a game
Distance: 2.55 miles a game
Hardest shot: 101.3 mph; 98th 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 with MTL · 963 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: MTL took 44.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.5% — 1.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: 963 minutes at five-on-five — 55th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nick Suzuki	36.4%	45.3%	45.9%
Kaiden Guhle	39.4%	43.5%	43.6%
Josh Anderson	39.4%	43.3%	45.2%

36.4% together, 45.3% for him apart and 45.9% for Suzuki 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

90 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 52 feet. 11% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 73% from beyond forty.