This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Johnathan Kovacevic
Montreal Canadiens Defense
Winnipeg gave him four games and put him on waivers; Montreal gave him seventy-seven and the best chance share on the blue line.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | WPG | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0.0 | 10:49 |
| 2022-23 | MTL | 77 | 3 | 12 | 15 | +3 | 39 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 92 | 3.3 | 17:25 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 81 | 3 | 12 | 15 | +4 | 41 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 99 | 3.0 | 17:05 |
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
3 goals and 12 assists in 77 games — 15 points — at 17:25 a night. Plus-3, 92 shots, 39 penalty minutes.
47.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five is the best figure of any Montreal defenceman, with his ice at 52-53 against an expectation of 46.33-51.41 — six goals better at the offensive end than the chances deserved.
On a club that finished thirtieth in chance generation and thirtieth in expected goals against, being the least bad of seven defencemen is a real distinction, and it belongs to a waiver claim.
He had played four NHL games before last season.
Two seasons, 81 games, 15 points.
The Finesse Game
92 shots at a median of 48 feet, 9 per cent from inside twenty and 65 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 54 shots on goal, 2 goals. Inside forty: 32 shots, 1 goal.
Three goals in seventy-seven games. There is no offensive dimension here and the club does not ask for one.
93.2 mph at the 66th percentile, on nine slap shots — an ordinary reading on volume too low to trust.
The Physical Game
6-5 and 223 — the tallest defenceman on the roster, and 39 penalty minutes.
Top speed 22.1 mph, the 43rd percentile; bursts 0.4 a game, the 16th; 2.45 miles a game, the 40th. Nothing in the tracking is remarkable in either direction.
He defends with reach and with size. At 6-5 he takes away the front of the net and gets a stick into lanes that shorter defencemen concede, and on a Montreal blue line that also dresses a 240-pound rookie and a 235-pound veteran, he is the one who does it without taking penalties.
45.4 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 29th percentile.
The Intangibles
Seventy-fourth overall in 2017 to Winnipeg out of Merrimack, four NHL games there across four seasons, and a waiver claim at twenty-five.
This is the least glamorous story in the chapter and one of the more encouraging. A club with the thirtieth-ranked defensive record found its best chance share sitting on the waiver wire, which says something about Winnipeg and something about how little of this is visible without the numbers.
He is twenty-six and the ceiling is a second pair. That is a useful thing to acquire for nothing.
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.
- drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
47.4% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 42.6% for his club in the minutes he sat: +4.8, 91st percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
“At 6-5 he takes away the front of the net and gets a stick into lanes that shorter defencemen concede, and on a Montreal blue line that also dresses a 240-pound rookie and a 235-pound veteran, he is the one who does it without taking penalties.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,186 minutes
- Expected goals
- 47.4%
- 34th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.2%
- 39th 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: 52 for, 53 against. Expected: 46.3 and 51.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 19 points of one another. 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.
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 — 66 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 · 77 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 71st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.36 a game
- Distance
- 2.45 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.2 mph
- 57th 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 · 1186 minutes at five-on-five
- Arber Xhekaj10%
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
- MTL took 44.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.4% — 3.4 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First pair, 1,186 minutes at five-on-five — 81st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jordan Harris | 49.3% | 45.3% | 43.9% |
| Nick Suzuki | 48.4% | 46.9% | 41.6% |
| Josh Anderson | 51.6% | 46.1% | 41.2% |
49.3% together, 45.3% for him apart and 43.9% for Harris 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
126 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 56 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 65% from beyond forty.