This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Jon Merrill
Minnesota Wild Defense
Twenty and a half miles an hour and one burst of speed every fourteen games, at fifteen minutes a night.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | NJD | 52 | 2 | 9 | 11 | -3 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 45 | 4.4 | 19:14 |
| 2014-15 | NJD | 66 | 2 | 12 | 14 | -14 | 24 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 47 | 4.3 | 20:33 |
| 2015-16 | NJD | 47 | 1 | 4 | 5 | -15 | 28 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 30 | 3.3 | 16:54 |
| 2016-17 | NJD | 51 | 1 | 5 | 6 | -9 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 48 | 2.1 | 18:34 |
| 2017-18 | VGK | 34 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +7 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 30 | 3.3 | 16:05 |
| 2018-19 | VGK | 57 | 3 | 12 | 15 | +16 | 53 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 72 | 4.2 | 17:53 |
| 2019-20 | VGK | 49 | 2 | 5 | 7 | +9 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 37 | 5.4 | 18:09 |
| 2020-21 | DET/MTL | 49 | 0 | 5 | 5 | -9 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 41 | 0.0 | 18:15 |
| 2021-22 | MIN | 69 | 4 | 16 | 20 | +15 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 59 | 6.8 | 17:07 |
| 2022-23 | MIN | 73 | 2 | 10 | 12 | -2 | 38 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 43 | 4.7 | 15:09 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 547 | 18 | 80 | 98 | -5 | 271 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 452 | 4.0 | 17:48 |
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
2 goals and 10 assists in 73 games — 12 points — at 15:09 a night. Minus-2, 43 shots, 38 penalty minutes.
46.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 30th percentile, with his ice at 36-40 against an expectation of 35.43-40.42 — process and result agreed almost exactly at both ends, which is rare and is not good news when the process is the 30th percentile.
Ten seasons, 547 games, 98 points, and eighteen goals in all of them.
The Finesse Game
43 shots at a median of 53 feet, 8 per cent from inside twenty and 73 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 25 shots on goal, 1 goal. Inside forty: 15 shots, 1 goal.
Forty-three shots in seventy-three games is one of the lowest volumes of any regular defenceman in these five chapters. He does not shoot, and eighteen goals in ten seasons says he is right not to.
91.9 mph at the 58th percentile, on six slap shots.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 204, and 38 penalty minutes.
Top speed 20.6 mph. Bursts 0.1 a game — the seventh-fewest in the league, and Maroon, eighth on that list, is his teammate. 2.05 miles a game, the 18th percentile.
One burst of speed roughly every fourteen games. There is no reading of that which is flattering, and the honest version is that he survives on position and anticipation because nothing else is available.
He blocks shots, kills penalties and takes the body in front of his own net. At 204 pounds, on a blue line where three regulars weigh under 175, that has a value the point totals do not show.
The Intangibles
Thirty-eighth overall in 2010 to New Jersey out of Michigan, and then Vegas, Detroit, Montreal and Minnesota.
50.5 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 48th percentile.
He is thirty-one, on a third pair, and has played 547 NHL games without ever being good at anything measurable. That is a career built on being where he is supposed to be, and this book records that ten seasons of it is evidence of something the numbers do not carry.
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 blocks shots, kills penalties and takes the body in front of his own net.”
“He blocks shots, kills penalties and takes the body in front of his own net.”
“There is no reading of that which is flattering, and the honest version is that he survives on position and anticipation because nothing else is available.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,024 minutes
- Expected goals
- 46.7%
- 30th pct
- Shot attempts
- 46.3%
- 24th 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: 36 for, 40 against. Expected: 35.4 and 40.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 23 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 — 54 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 · 73 games
- Top speed
- 20.6 mph
- 18th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.07 a game
- Distance
- 2.05 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 91.9 mph
- 51st 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 · 1024 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
- MIN took 50.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.7% — 3.3 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 1,024 minutes at five-on-five — 61st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calen Addison | 51.6% | 41.6% | 46.4% |
| Mats Zuccarello | 48.8% | 45.7% | 52.9% |
| Matt Boldy | 50.5% | 45.2% | 54.2% |
51.6% together, 41.6% for him apart and 46.4% for Addison 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
71 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 42 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 73% from beyond forty.