Johnny Gaudreau

From plus-64 and 115 points to minus-33 and 74, in one summer and one move.

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

2013-14	CGY	1	1	0	1	+1	0	0	0	0	1	100.0	15:11
2014-15	CGY	80	24	40	64	+11	14	8	0	4	167	14.4	17:43
2015-16	CGY	79	30	48	78	+4	20	6	0	6	217	13.8	19:56
2016-17	CGY	72	18	43	61	-7	4	4	0	3	182	9.9	18:29
2017-18	CGY	80	24	60	84	+2	26	3	0	4	227	10.6	19:25
2018-19	CGY	82	36	63	99	+18	24	6	0	8	245	14.7	20:04
2019-20	CGY	70	18	40	58	-10	12	6	0	2	209	8.6	18:47
2020-21	CGY	56	19	30	49	+2	6	7	0	5	112	17.0	18:25
2021-22	CGY	82	40	75	115	+64	26	6	0	9	262	15.3	18:34
2022-23	CBJ	80	21	53	74	-33	22	3	0	4	220	9.6	19:25
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	682	231	452	683	+52	154	49	0	45	1842	12.5	19:00

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

21 goals and 53 assists in 80 games, minus-33, 19:25 a night, 220 shots.

The year before, in Calgary, he scored 40 goals and 75 assists in 82 games and finished plus-64. The points fell by 41 and the plus-minus moved 97. There is nothing else like it in this edition.

47.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 36th percentile, with his ice at 54-71 against an expectation of 54.75-59.63. The offence landed exactly where the chances said it would. The eleven goals came off the other end.

So the honest reading is that the collapse is mostly the club around him. Columbus were 30th in attempts, 29th in chances and 31st in goaltending. Calgary were second in attempts.

The Finesse Game

220 shots at a median of 26 feet, 30 per cent from inside twenty and 14 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside forty: 183 shots on goal, twenty goals, 10.93 per cent. Beyond forty: 34 shots, one goal.

10.9 per cent from close range is a modest number for a player of this class and it is the one place the season’s decline shows up in his own record rather than the club’s. The 53 assists did not move much: he has 452 in 682 career games and the passing has never depended on anything but him.

89.6 mph at the 41st percentile. He has never beaten goaltenders with the shot.

The Physical Game

5-9 and 163 pounds — one of the smallest players in the league, and it has never been the limitation people expected.

23.2 mph at the 93rd percentile, 3.03 miles a game at the 81st, 1.6 bursts over twenty a game at the 75th. He is quick, he covers ground, and at 30 none of that has started to go.

22 penalty minutes in 80 games. He does not defend and never has: the 36th-percentile expected-goal share on a club this bad is a shared failure, but nothing in his game arrests it.

The Intangibles

104th overall in 2011, a Hobey Baker at Boston College, and eight seasons in Calgary that ended with 115 points and a departure nobody in Alberta has finished processing.

He signed in Columbus for seven years to be closer to family. That is a legitimate reason and it is also the whole explanation for why the best free agent of his summer went to the club that finished 30th.

74 points on that team is a good season. It reads as a bad one because of what it followed.

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
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.

clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live
4 of his 21 goals late or in overtime, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
durable· was available
80 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
47.9% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 42.3% for his club in the minutes he sat: +5.6, 92nd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
15:08 a game at five-on-five, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“he has 452 in 682 career games and the passing has never depended on anything but him”
edgesa strength· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“He is quick, he covers ground, and at 30 none of that has started to go.”
defensively-responsiblehe lacks it· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“He does not defend and never has”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,211 minutes

Expected goals: 47.9%; 37th pct
Shot attempts: 47.2%; 31st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 54 for, 71 against. Expected: 54.8 and 59.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

53rd

Numbers

37th

The two rank him within 16 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 · 80 games

Top speed: 23.2 mph; 94th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.55 a game
Distance: 3.03 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.6 mph; 65th 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 · 1211 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: CBJ took 44.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.9% — 3.8 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,211 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Boone Jenner	49.0%	45.5%	43.6%
Patrik Laine	48.0%	47.8%	47.6%
Andrew Peeke	44.9%	49.3%	43.0%

49.0% together, 45.5% for him apart and 43.6% for Jenner 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

302 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 21 of them goals. His median goal came from 19 feet. 30% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.