Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2023-24 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2023-24 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

12

Kevin Shattenkirk

Boston Bruins Defense

The third percentile in top speed and the first in sprints, on a defenceman asked to play nineteen minutes.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2010-11COL/STL7293443-4363021088.319:50
2011-12STL8193443+20605021785.121:36
2012-13STL4851823+220200845.921:18
2013-14STL81103545+1387051885.320:34
2014-15STL5683644+19524011355.922:34
2015-16STL72143044-14516011807.822:25
2016-17STL/WSH80134356-7478021618.119:56
2017-18NYR4651823-1444201945.320:16
2018-19NYR7322628-15201001481.418:56
2019-20TBL7082634+22381001316.118:54
2020-21ANA5521315-828100932.121:12
2021-22ANA8282735-9361011634.921:25
2022-23ANA7542327-20561001452.819:18
2023-24 so far—————————————
Career—89197363460-275264201518085.420:35

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

4 goals and 23 assists in 75 games for Anaheim — 27 points at 19:18 a night, minus-20, on 145 shots and 56 penalty minutes.

42.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,210 minutes, the 9th percentile — though it was earned on the worst club in hockey, and 44.1 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone at the 24th percentile says he was not sheltered while doing it. His ice went 48-63 against an expectation of 43.8-59.68.

The Finesse Game

145 attempts at a median of 50 feet, 73 per cent from beyond 40 and 7 per cent from inside 20, converting at 2.76 per cent — four goals on 145 shots.

363 career assists is the reason he has played 891 games. He runs a power play from the point as well as most, the seam pass to the far circle is still there, and 23 assists on a club that scored 209 goals is real work.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 203 and he has never defended with force — 526 penalty minutes in 891 games, most of it accumulated a decade ago.

The skating is now the whole limitation and the measurement is severe: 21.0 mph is the 3rd percentile in the league, and 0.1 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game is the 1st. He is among the two or three least mobile defencemen with a regular job. A man who cannot skate can still defend if he is never made to turn, and nineteen minutes a night against NHL forwards is a great deal of turning.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2007, thirteen seasons, six clubs, 891 games and a Stanley Cup in Tampa.

He is 34, signed for one year on a club with a settled top four. The role is the seventh defenceman who plays the power play, and that is a sensible use of him — the risk is a defence corps thin enough that he ends up at nineteen minutes again, which the tracking says he can no longer survive.

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.

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “He runs a power play from the point as well as most, the seam pass to the far circle is still there”

  • edgeshe lacks it· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone

    “A man who cannot skate can still defend if he is never made to turn, and nineteen minutes a night against NHL forwards is a great deal of turning.”

  • punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally

    “he has never defended with force — 526 penalty minutes in 891 games, most of it accumulated a decade ago”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,210 minutes

Expected goals
42.3%
9th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
44.2%
12th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 48 for, 63 against. Expected: 43.8 and 59.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
12th
Numbers
9th

The two rank him within 3 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 — 56 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 · 75 games

Top speed
21.0 mph
27th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5

Bursts over 20 mph
0.11 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.54 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
94.4 mph
67th pct

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 with ANA · 1210 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
ANA took 39.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.3% — 2.6 above the club he did it on.
The role
Second pair, 1,210 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Simon Benoit41.8%42.6%34.6%
Trevor Zegras44.2%41.4%42.5%
Ryan Strome42.9%42.0%36.0%

41.8% together, 42.6% for him apart and 34.6% for Benoit apart. Benoit was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Benoit 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

164 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 50 feet. 7% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 73% from beyond forty.