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

Joel Kiviranta

Eight goals and one assist in 70 games.

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

2019-20	DAL	11	1	0	1	-1	4	0	0	0	13	7.7	10:39
2020-21	DAL	26	6	5	11	+3	6	1	0	0	31	19.4	12:10
2021-22	DAL	56	1	6	7	-6	10	0	0	0	59	1.7	9:31
2022-23	DAL	70	8	1	9	-9	40	0	1	0	85	9.4	12:09
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	163	16	12	28	-13	60	1	1	0	188	8.5	11:09

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

8 goals and 1 assist in 70 games for Dallas, minus-9, 12:09 a night. That ratio is close to unique in this edition: eight of his nine points were goals he scored himself.

46.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 30th percentile, with his ice at 13-25 against an expectation of 23.98-27.48 — eleven goals short at the offensive end, which is the worst finishing gap of any Colorado forward and was earned in Dallas.

Four seasons, 163 games, 28 points.

The Finesse Game

85 shots at a median of 25 feet, 45 per cent from inside twenty.

Inside forty: 65 shots, six goals. Beyond forty: 17 shots, two.

84.5 mph at the 10th percentile. The shot is weak, the passing is close to non-existent on the evidence of one assist in seventy games, and what he does is get to the net and finish what arrives.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 185. 21.5 mph at the 14th percentile and 2.00 miles a game at the 16th — slow and light on mileage, which is a difficult combination to carry into a fourth-line job.

40 penalty minutes in 70 games at twelve minutes a night is a fairly high rate. He competes; he does not intimidate.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Vantaa, and signed by Dallas out of the Finnish league at 23.

He scored a hat trick in Game 7 of the 2020 second round — against Colorado, the club that has now signed him. This book has said elsewhere that a seven-game series is a regime the regular season never sees, and he is a small, specific piece of evidence for it.

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.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, out of Vantaa, and signed by Dallas out of the Finnish league at 23.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“the passing is close to non-existent on the evidence of one assist in seventy games”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 732 minutes

Expected goals: 46.6%; 30th pct
Shot attempts: 50.9%; 61st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 13 for, 25 against. Expected: 24.0 and 27.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

4th

Numbers

30th

The 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 52 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 · 70 games

Top speed: 21.5 mph; 24th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.91 a game
Distance: 2.00 miles a game
Hardest shot: 84.5 mph; 34th 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 DAL · 732 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 46.6% — 5.4 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 732 minutes at five-on-five — 33rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Luke Glendening	45.0%	48.3%	44.6%
Radek Faksa	50.1%	43.7%	52.4%
Esa Lindell	46.2%	46.9%	51.0%

45.0% together, 48.3% for him apart and 44.6% for Glendening apart. He was better away from Glendening, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Glendening.

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

110 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 8 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.