Justin Braun
Philadelphia Flyers Defense
The longest median shot distance of all 202 defencemen and the 3rd-least ground covered of 192, in a twelfth season.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-11 | SJS | 28 | 2 | 9 | 11 | -1 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 44 | 4.5 | 16:30 |
| 2011-12 | SJS | 66 | 2 | 9 | 11 | -2 | 23 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 113 | 1.8 | 16:33 |
| 2012-13 | SJS | 41 | 0 | 7 | 7 | -5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 48 | 0.0 | 18:48 |
| 2013-14 | SJS | 82 | 4 | 13 | 17 | +19 | 20 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 121 | 3.3 | 20:59 |
| 2014-15 | SJS | 70 | 1 | 22 | 23 | +8 | 48 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 94 | 1.1 | 21:02 |
| 2015-16 | SJS | 80 | 4 | 19 | 23 | +11 | 36 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 114 | 3.5 | 20:34 |
| 2016-17 | SJS | 81 | 4 | 9 | 13 | +1 | 28 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 95 | 4.2 | 20:05 |
| 2017-18 | SJS | 81 | 5 | 28 | 33 | +7 | 28 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 115 | 4.3 | 21:20 |
| 2018-19 | SJS | 78 | 2 | 14 | 16 | -14 | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 105 | 1.9 | 20:18 |
| 2019-20 | PHI | 62 | 3 | 16 | 19 | -2 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 70 | 4.3 | 17:16 |
| 2020-21 | PHI | 53 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 0 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 59 | 1.7 | 18:32 |
| 2021-22 | PHI/NYR | 69 | 6 | 12 | 18 | +2 | 36 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 73 | 8.2 | 19:33 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 791 | 34 | 163 | 197 | +24 | 298 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 1051 | 3.2 | 19:36 |
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
69 games between Philadelphia and the Rangers, 6 goals and 12 assists at 19:33 a night, plus-2, thirty-six penalty minutes, 73 shots. Two hundred and first overall in 2007 — the seventh round — and twelve seasons, 791 games, 197 points out of it.
The Finesse Game
Ninety-one per cent of his attempts came from outside the slot and his median shot travelled 56.9 feet, the longest of the 202 defencemen who played forty games.
Nick Seeler is 3rd on the same list at 56.4 feet. One blue line held two of the three men in the league who shot from furthest away.
3.25 shots per 60 is the 18th percentile and six goals came out of seventy-three of them — an 8.2 per cent rate at the 90th percentile, off the smallest sample any of it could have come from.
0.90 even-strength points per 60 is the 44th percentile and none of his points came on the power play: four seconds a night.
44.6 per cent of the expected goals is the 20th-lowest of the 202 defencemen and 46.1 per cent of the attempts the 18th percentile, out of 41.2 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 105th-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.
Across the 1,420 five-on-five attempts he shared with Ivan Provorov, the pair took 44.4 per cent of the expected goals. Provorov apart from him is a 49.6 per cent player across 1,365 attempts. That is the largest with-and-without gap on the roster and it does not point at Provorov.
The Physical Game
5.38 blocks per 60 is the 83rd percentile among defencemen, in a twelfth NHL season at 6-2 and 205 pounds.
3.87 hits per 60 is the 49th percentile. 0.40 penalties drawn per 60 against 0.80 taken, which is the 28th percentile on the net, and thirty-six penalty minutes came out of sixty-nine games.
The Intangibles
7.74 miles per 60 is the 3rd-least of the 192 defencemen the tracking covers, against a 22.3 mph top speed at the 69th percentile.
Slow feet were never the complaint; the ground covered is. A defenceman in the bottom two per cent of the position for distance is a defenceman who is not joining anything.
He is 35 with 791 games and a plus-24 career, most of it on San Jose clubs that went a long way. The blocks and the reach are still there and the shot chart says exactly where he plays, and a 44.6 per cent expected-goal share on a club that finished 27th in attempts is what a twelfth season costs.
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.
- perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
85.4% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 96th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
- hard-shot· beats a goaltender from range
5 of 88 attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 5.7%, 98th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.21) · 16% keep it
“5.38 blocks per 60 is the 83rd percentile among defencemen, in a twelfth NHL season at 6-2 and 205 pounds.”
“Ninety-one per cent of his attempts came from outside the slot and his median shot travelled 56.9 feet, the longest of the 202 defencemen who played forty games.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 1,181 minutes
- Expected goals
- 44.6%
- 16th pct
- Shot attempts
- 46.1%
- 22nd 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: 40 for, 44 against. Expected: 39.1 and 48.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 10 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 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 · 69 games
- Top speed
- 22.3 mph
- 79th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.52 a game
- Distance
- 2.52 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 95.2 mph
- 72nd 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 · 1058 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, 2021-22
- The club
- NYR took 46.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.6% — 2.1 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 1,181 minutes at five-on-five — 83rd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ivan Provorov | 44.4% | 45.1% | 49.6% |
| Travis Konecny | 48.8% | 42.9% | 48.9% |
| Scott Laughton | 50.6% | 42.2% | 45.7% |
44.4% together, 45.1% for him apart and 49.6% for Provorov apart. Provorov was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more than for him.
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
103 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 59 feet. 6% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 85% from beyond forty.