This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2023-24 report →
John Klingberg
Anaheim Ducks Defense
Forty-seven points and minus-28, 303 career assists, and a one-year contract taken in Anaheim because the market he expected never arrived.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | DAL | 65 | 11 | 29 | 40 | +5 | 32 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 98 | 11.2 | 21:50 |
| 2015-16 | DAL | 76 | 10 | 48 | 58 | +22 | 30 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 171 | 5.9 | 22:41 |
| 2016-17 | DAL | 80 | 13 | 36 | 49 | +2 | 34 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 124 | 10.5 | 23:21 |
| 2017-18 | DAL | 82 | 8 | 59 | 67 | +10 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 204 | 3.9 | 24:04 |
| 2018-19 | DAL | 64 | 10 | 35 | 45 | +6 | 12 | 5 | 0 | 5 | 153 | 6.5 | 24:32 |
| 2019-20 | DAL | 58 | 6 | 26 | 32 | -10 | 22 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 120 | 5.0 | 22:10 |
| 2020-21 | DAL | 53 | 7 | 29 | 36 | -15 | 23 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 108 | 6.5 | 22:42 |
| 2021-22 | DAL | 74 | 6 | 41 | 47 | -28 | 34 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 139 | 4.3 | 22:13 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 552 | 71 | 303 | 374 | -8 | 213 | 19 | 0 | 21 | 1117 | 6.4 | 22:59 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
With Dallas. 6 goals and 41 assists in 74 games — 47 points at 22:13 a night, minus-28, with 1 power-play goal on 139 shots and 34 penalty minutes.
Forty-seven points and minus-28 in the same season is unusual and both halves are real.
51.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,336 minutes, the 62nd percentile. His ice went 54-68 against an expectation of 63.85-60.03 — ten goals of scoring that the chances said should have arrived and did not, and eight more conceded than they predicted. The chance share says his minutes were fine. The scoreboard says nothing about them went right.
2:50 a night of power play is the 90th percentile among defencemen, and 43 per cent of his points came on it, the 94th. Take the power play away and the even-strength production is 1.15 points per 60, the 73rd percentile — good, not the 47-point player.
The Finesse Game
303 assists in 552 games is a first-pass record almost no defenceman in the league can match. He is the reason a power play has a shape, and Anaheim’s power play was 32nd in the league at creating chances last season, which is the argument for signing him.
139 attempts at a median of 48 feet at 88.5 mph — the 9th percentile of shot velocity among defencemen. Six goals. The point shot is a pass that happens to be aimed at the net.
3.14 giveaways per 60 is among the highest figures for a defenceman in the league. He holds the puck to make something happen and a share of the time the something is a turnover at his own blue line. That is the trade and it has been the trade for eight seasons.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 185, and he does not defend. 2.81 blocks per 60 is the 9th percentile among defencemen and 2.08 hits per 60 is the 19th. There is no part of his game that involves winning a puck by taking it.
The skating is ordinary — 21.7 mph top speed at the 36th percentile — with real endurance behind it at 8.71 miles per sixty, the 80th. He is not beaten by speed. He is beaten in his own end because the answer he reaches for is always the pass.
The Intangibles
One hundred and thirty-first overall in 2010, 552 games in Dallas, 374 points, and for the better part of a decade the best offensive defenceman that organisation had.
He is 30, and he came to Anaheim on a one-year deal after a summer in which nobody offered him what he thought he was worth. A club with the 32nd-ranked power play has just bought the single skill it was most missing, on the shortest possible term, from a man who needs the season to go well as much as the club does. If it does, he is traded in March. If it does not, both sides find out something they would rather not have.
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.
“303 assists in 552 games is a first-pass record almost no defenceman in the league can match”
“2.81 blocks per 60 is the 9th percentile among defencemen”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 1,336 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.5%
- 66th pct
- Shot attempts
- 49%
- 45th 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: 54 for, 68 against. Expected: 63.9 and 60.0.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 40 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 55 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, 2021-22 · 74 games
- Top speed
- 21.7 mph
- 55th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.68 a game
- Distance
- 3.23 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.5 mph
- 29th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.4
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
2021-22 with DAL · 1336 minutes at five-on-five
- Esa Lindell40%
- Ryan Suter30%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- DAL took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.5% — 0.5 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,336 minutes at five-on-five — 91st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Esa Lindell | 49.6% | 52.8% | 49.2% |
| Jason Robertson | 58.8% | 47.3% | 58.2% |
| Joe Pavelski | 58.9% | 47.1% | 55.4% |
49.6% together, 52.8% for him apart and 49.2% for Lindell apart. He was better away from Lindell, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Lindell.
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
207 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 28 feet. 8% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 68% from beyond forty.