This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Joel Eriksson Ek
Minnesota Wild Center
Fifty shots on goal from beyond forty feet, no goals, and a median shot of seventeen feet.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | MIN | 15 | 3 | 4 | 7 | +1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 15 | 20.0 | 10:37 |
| 2017-18 | MIN | 75 | 6 | 10 | 16 | +2 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 124 | 4.8 | 12:47 |
| 2018-19 | MIN | 58 | 7 | 7 | 14 | -7 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 111 | 6.3 | 13:30 |
| 2019-20 | MIN | 62 | 8 | 21 | 29 | +7 | 22 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 102 | 7.8 | 15:43 |
| 2020-21 | MIN | 56 | 19 | 11 | 30 | +16 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 119 | 16.0 | 17:03 |
| 2021-22 | MIN | 77 | 26 | 23 | 49 | +16 | 28 | 12 | 0 | 3 | 223 | 11.7 | 18:35 |
| 2022-23 | MIN | 78 | 23 | 38 | 61 | +4 | 44 | 12 | 2 | 1 | 247 | 9.3 | 19:00 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 421 | 92 | 114 | 206 | +39 | 160 | 25 | 2 | 13 | 941 | 9.8 | 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
23 goals and 38 assists in 78 games — 61 points — with twelve on the power play and two shorthanded. Plus-4, 19:00 a night, 247 shots at 9.3 per cent, 44 penalty minutes.
Sixty-one points is a career high and the third straight season of improvement: 29, 30, 49, 61.
52.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 68th percentile, with his ice at 39-31 against an expectation of 39.86-36.44 — exactly the chances at the offensive end and five better at the defensive.
Seven seasons, 421 games, 206 points, all of them in Minnesota.
The Finesse Game
247 shots at a median of 17 feet, 54 per cent from inside twenty and 22 per cent from beyond forty. That is the closest median shot of any Minnesota forward.
Beyond forty: 50 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 179 shots, 23 goals, 12.85 per cent.
Fifty long shots and nothing, and it is the second time in this chapter — Boldy took 58 and scored none either. Between them, 108 shots from beyond forty feet and no return at all.
50 tip-ins, 10 wrap-arounds and 19 deflections out of 336 tracked attempts. Nobody in this chapter puts more of his volume on net by redirection, and it is the signature of a centre who lives in the blue paint.
87.6 mph at the 27th percentile, on eight slap shots. The shot is not the point.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 207, and 44 penalty minutes.
Top speed 22.6 mph, the 67th percentile; bursts 1.5 a game, the 74th; 2.85 miles a game, the 71st.
He stands in front of the goaltender and takes what comes, and he does it against the other club’s best defence pair. Twelve of his twenty-three goals came on the power play and most of them came from the same four square feet.
He kills penalties, takes the defensive-zone draw and scored two shorthanded goals doing it. At 39.2 per cent zone starts, the 12th percentile, he is the man Minnesota puts out when the puck is in the wrong end.
The Intangibles
Twentieth overall in 2015 out of Farjestad, and seven seasons of the same club.
He is the reason Minnesota finished tenth in expected goals against per sixty with the twenty-third-ranked chance-generating group in front of it. That is a claim this book cannot prove and states plainly as an inference: the defensive record moves with the centre who takes the hard shifts, and he is it.
Sixty-one points from that job is the useful part. Twenty-six-year-olds who defend and score are not common and are rarely cheap.
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
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
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“He stands in front of the goaltender and takes what comes, and he does it against the other club's best defence pair.”
“He kills penalties, takes the defensive-zone draw and scored two shorthanded goals doing it.”
“He kills penalties, takes the defensive-zone draw and scored two shorthanded goals doing it.”
“At 39.2 per cent zone starts, the 12th percentile, he is the man Minnesota puts out when the puck is in the wrong end.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 971 minutes
- Expected goals
- 52.2%
- 68th pct
- Shot attempts
- 50%
- 53rd 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: 39 for, 31 against. Expected: 39.9 and 36.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 29 points above where the numbers do. 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 81 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 · 78 games
- Top speed
- 22.6 mph
- 72nd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.54 a game
- Distance
- 2.85 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.6 mph
- 52nd 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 · 971 minutes at five-on-five
- Matt Boldy40%
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
- MIN took 50.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.2% — 2.2 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 971 minutes at five-on-five — 56th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marcus Foligno | 54.0% | 51.0% | 42.1% |
| Matt Boldy | 56.7% | 49.2% | 51.3% |
| Matt Dumba | 53.9% | 51.1% | 47.8% |
54.0% together, 51.0% for him apart and 42.1% for Foligno 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
320 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 24 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 54% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.