This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
John Marino
New Jersey Devils Defense
The hardest zone starts of any Devils defenceman, twenty-one minutes a night, and a sixth-round pick Edmonton never played.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | PIT | 56 | 6 | 20 | 26 | +17 | 20 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 61 | 9.8 | 20:15 |
| 2020-21 | PIT | 52 | 3 | 10 | 13 | +5 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 56 | 5.4 | 20:44 |
| 2021-22 | PIT | 81 | 1 | 24 | 25 | +1 | 23 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 90 | 1.1 | 20:38 |
| 2022-23 | NJD | 64 | 4 | 14 | 18 | +21 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 67 | 6.0 | 21:04 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 253 | 14 | 68 | 82 | +44 | 71 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 274 | 5.1 | 20:41 |
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
4 goals and 14 assists in 64 games — 18 points — at 21:04 a night, the second-heaviest ice time on the club. Plus-21, 67 shots, 20 penalty minutes.
54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 81st percentile, with his ice at 44-37 against an expectation of 49.45-41.85 — five goals short of the chances at the attacking end and five better at the defensive.
He started 47 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone, the 33rd percentile: 309 attacking draws against 348. That is the hardest deployment New Jersey gave any defenceman, and the 81st-percentile chance share came out of it.
Four seasons, 253 games, 82 points, and a career plus-44.
The Finesse Game
67 shots at a median of 50 feet, 67 per cent of them from beyond forty, and four goals.
Beyond forty: 44 shots on goal and 1 goal, 2.27 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Seven shots all season from inside twenty.
There is nothing here and it does not matter. The shot is a means of putting the puck where a forward can retrieve it, and the fourteen assists come from the outlet rather than from the blue line.
44 wrist shots and 26 snap out of 91 tracked attempts, with 14 slap. 93.4 mph at the 67th percentile.
What the file is built on is the first pass, and 68 assists against 14 goals across four seasons is a consistent enough shape to trust.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 200, with twenty penalty minutes in sixty-four games.
Top speed 21.9 mph, the 28th percentile; 0.8 bursts a game, the 42nd; 2.83 miles a game, the 69th.
An unremarkable set of readings under twenty-one minutes a night of the hardest starts on the club, which is the point: the skating is adequate and the positioning is what holds it up.
He defends with his stick and his gaps rather than with contact, takes almost no penalties for a man in that role, and does not run out of room because he does not put himself in it.
The Intangibles
One hundred and fifty-fourth overall in 2015 to Edmonton, who never played him a game. Pittsburgh took his rights instead, and he was a twenty-minute defenceman in his first professional season.
The career line is 14 goals, 68 assists and a plus-44 in 253 games, which for a sixth-round pick who was allowed to walk is an extraordinary return.
He is twenty-six and has never had a season where the underlying numbers argued against him. The whole projection is whether a defenceman with four goals holds a top-four job when the club has to pay him like 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.
“He defends with his stick and his gaps rather than with contact, takes almost no penalties for a man in that role, and does not run out of room because he does not put himself in it.”
“What the file is built on is the first pass, and 68 assists against 14 goals across four seasons is a consistent enough shape to trust.”
“That is the hardest deployment New Jersey gave any defenceman, and the 81st-percentile chance share came out of it.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,105 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.2%
- 82nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.7%
- 77th 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: 44 for, 37 against. Expected: 49.5 and 41.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 44 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 — 63 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 · 64 games
- Top speed
- 21.9 mph
- 60th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.78 a game
- Distance
- 2.83 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.4 mph
- 58th 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 90.0
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 · 1105 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
- NJD took 56.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.2% — 1.9 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,105 minutes at five-on-five — 71st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ryan Graves | 53.9% | 55.1% | 53.3% |
| Nico Hischier | 59.3% | 51.6% | 59.5% |
| Tomas Tatar | 63.6% | 49.6% | 61.4% |
53.9% together, 55.1% for him apart and 53.3% for Graves apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.
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
89 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 25 feet. 11% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 67% from beyond forty.