Kale Clague

Thirty-three games, no goals, and the fifth percentile in top speed.

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

2019-20	LAK	4	0	0	0	-3	2	0	0	0	2	0.0	14:34
2020-21	LAK	18	0	6	6	-6	4	0	0	0	24	0.0	17:12
2021-22	LAK/MTL	36	2	8	10	-10	20	0	0	0	26	7.7	16:44
2022-23	BUF	33	0	4	4	-3	24	0	0	0	24	0.0	15:06
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	91	2	18	20	-22	50	0	0	0	76	2.6	16:08

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

No goals and 4 assists in 33 games — 4 points at 15:06 a night, minus-3, on 24 shots and 24 penalty minutes.

51.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 485 minutes, the 61st percentile, which is the best figure of any Buffalo defenceman and comes from 485 sheltered minutes rather than from anything he did. His ice went 24-25 against an expectation of 23.01-21.85.

The Finesse Game

24 attempts at a median of 54 feet, 66 per cent from beyond 40, and none of them went in. 20 points in 91 career games, 18 of them assists.

He was drafted as an offensive defenceman with a good first pass and that description has survived, in the sense that nothing has been added to it.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190 and there is no physical element — 50 penalty minutes in 91 games.

The skating is the problem and the measurement is severe: 21.1 mph is the 5th percentile in the league. A defenceman of ordinary size who cannot defend physically and cannot skate has to be exceptional with the puck, and 20 points in 91 games says he is not.

The Intangibles

Fifty-first overall in 2016 to Los Angeles, then Montreal on waivers, then here on waivers — claimed twice in two years, which is the market’s opinion in its plainest form.

He is 25. He is a seventh defenceman and organisational depth, and the honest expectation is Rochester.

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.

ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
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.

transitionpresent and ordinary· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He was drafted as an offensive defenceman with a good first pass and that description has survived, in the sense that nothing has been added to it.”
punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“there is no physical element — 50 penalty minutes in 91 games”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 485 minutes

Expected goals: 51.3%; 61st pct
Shot attempts: 53.1%; 80th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 24 for, 25 against. Expected: 23.0 and 21.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

3rd

Numbers

61st

The numbers rank him 58 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 — 50 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 · 33 games

Top speed: 21.1 mph; 32nd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.55 a game
Distance: 2.05 miles a game
Hardest shot: 86.2 mph; 21st 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 · 485 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: BUF took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.3% — 1.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: 485 minutes at five-on-five — 14th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Owen Power	47.0%	53.7%	49.6%
Kyle Okposo	43.0%	54.0%	50.8%
Jeff Skinner	60.3%	47.8%	51.5%

47.0% together, 53.7% for him apart and 49.6% for Power apart. He was better away from Power, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Power.

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

32 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 0 of them goals. 13% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 66% from beyond forty.