This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

Justin Holl

No goals in thirty-eight games, eleven in 323, and a career plus-66 that nobody expected.

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

2017-18	TOR	2	2	0	2	+5	0	0	0	1	2	100.0	17:22
2018-19	TOR	11	0	1	1	-5	2	0	0	0	6	0.0	12:29
2019-20	TOR	68	2	16	18	+13	43	0	0	0	89	2.3	18:31
2020-21	TOR	55	2	18	20	+16	25	0	0	1	57	3.5	21:04
2021-22	TOR	69	3	20	23	+14	41	0	1	1	64	4.7	20:12
2022-23	TOR	80	2	16	18	+15	39	0	0	1	60	3.3	20:14
2023-24	DET	38	0	5	5	+8	22	0	0	0	14	0.0	15:05
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	323	11	76	87	+66	172	0	1	4	292	3.8	19:07

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

Thirty-eight games, no goals and 5 assists, 15:05 a night and plus-8. He took 44.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 529 minutes, the 20th percentile, and his ice went 27-21 against an expectation of 19.25-23.82.

A plus-8 in 38 games on a club that conceded 274 goals, and a chance share in the 15th percentile underneath it. The first season of a Detroit contract that has not gone well.

The Finesse Game

Fourteen shots in 38 games and none went in. Eleven goals in 323 career games at 3.77 per cent is one of the lowest conversion rates any defenceman carries.

Seventy-six career assists is a better number than the goals suggest and the first pass is quick and accurate. He does not carry the puck out.

The Physical Game

He is 6-4 and 194 and light for the height. Twenty-two penalty minutes in 38 games is a moderate rate.

He defends the rush with reach and takes away the inside lane early, which is the entire defensive game. He does not win the wall and does not clear a crease at that weight.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2010 out of Tonka Bay, four years at Minnesota, five in the minors, and a first regular job at 26. He is plus-66 across 323 games, which is an unusual number for a third-pair defenceman.

He is 32 and fifth or sixth on a blue line that just lost two men. Thirty-eight games is not a season and the club needs more than that from him.

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
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.

defends-with-reacha strength· takes the puck before the contact happens
“He defends the rush with reach and takes away the inside lane early, which is the entire defensive game.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not win the wall and does not clear a crease at that weight.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 529 minutes

Expected goals: 44.7%; 20th pct
Shot attempts: 46.1%; 23rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 27 for, 21 against. Expected: 19.3 and 23.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

2nd

Numbers

20th

The two rank him within 18 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 53 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, 2023-24 · 38 games

Top speed: 21.3 mph; 32nd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.42 a game
Distance: 2.16 miles a game
Hardest shot: 75.0 mph; 5th 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

2023-24 · 529 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, 2023-24

The club: DET took 45.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.7% — 1.2 below the club he did it on.
The role: 529 minutes at five-on-five — 19th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Shayne Gostisbehere	42.0%	46.2%	47.9%
Joe Veleno	46.5%	44.0%	43.7%
Olli Määttä	41.8%	45.8%	51.6%

42.0% together, 46.2% for him apart and 47.9% for Gostisbehere apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

27 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 0 of them goals. 4% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 67% from beyond forty.