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

Joel Hanley

Eight seasons, 151 games, and not one shot from inside twenty feet all year.

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

2015-16	MTL	10	0	6	6	0	0	0	0	0	10	0.0	16:00
2016-17	MTL	7	0	0	0	-3	4	0	0	0	5	0.0	10:09
2017-18	ARI	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	0.0	11:08
2018-19	DAL	16	0	0	0	0	2	0	0	0	9	0.0	13:42
2019-20	DAL	8	0	2	2	0	6	0	0	0	4	0.0	11:21
2020-21	DAL	35	0	8	8	+6	2	0	0	0	27	0.0	13:01
2021-22	DAL	44	2	4	6	-13	4	0	0	0	18	11.1	11:56
2022-23	DAL	26	0	2	2	+5	15	0	0	0	14	0.0	11:38
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	151	2	22	24	-5	33	0	0	0	89	2.3	12:27

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

No goals and 2 assists in 26 games, plus-5, 11:38 a night.

53.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 300 minutes, the 78th percentile, with his ice at 12-8 against an expectation of 10.76-9.37. On 300 minutes it is a footnote rather than a finding, and it is a favourable one.

Eight seasons and 151 games — an average of nineteen a year. He has never played more than 44.

The Finesse Game

14 shots at a median of 55 feet, 83 per cent of them from beyond forty and not one from inside twenty.

Beyond forty: 11 shots on goal, none in. Inside forty: 3 shots, none in.

Two goals in 151 career games. There is no offensive game at all and the club is not looking for one.

87.6 mph at the 28th percentile.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 186, and small for a defenceman. 21.2 mph at the 6th percentile, 0.2 bursts over twenty a game at the 3rd, and 1.73 miles a game at the 5th.

That is close to the bottom of the feed on all three measures, at eleven minutes a night. The mileage is ice time; the speed is not.

15 penalty minutes in 26 games. For a seventh defenceman that is a high rate and it reads as a man arriving late.

He is 32 and none of this is going to improve.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Massachusetts-Lowell, and a career of call-ups across Montreal, Arizona and Dallas.

He has played 151 NHL games in eight seasons and been on an NHL roster for most of them, which is a career built entirely on being available and not being a problem. Dallas keep re-signing him. That is the whole scouting report and it is a real one.

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.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, out of Massachusetts-Lowell, and a career of call-ups across Montreal, Arizona and Dallas.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 300 minutes

Expected goals: 53.5%; 78th pct
Shot attempts: 52%; 71st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 12 for, 8 against. Expected: 10.8 and 9.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

1st

Numbers

78th

The numbers rank him 77 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 48 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 · 26 games

Top speed: 21.2 mph; 33rd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.15 a game
Distance: 1.73 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.6 mph; 28th 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 · 300 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: DAL took 52.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.5% — 1.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: 300 minutes at five-on-five — 6th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Ryan Suter	57.4%	51.2%	52.5%
Jason Robertson	59.4%	49.9%	59.3%
Joe Pavelski	55.2%	52.6%	57.8%

57.4% together, 51.2% for him apart and 52.5% for Suter 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

23 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 0 of them goals. 0% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 83% from beyond forty.