This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Kirill Kaprizov

Forty goals in sixty-seven games from the fifth-most favourable deployment in the league.

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

2020-21	MIN	55	27	24	51	+10	16	8	0	3	157	17.2	18:18
2021-22	MIN	81	47	61	108	+27	34	14	0	5	289	16.3	19:06
2022-23	MIN	67	40	35	75	+4	45	17	0	6	261	15.3	21:07
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	203	114	120	234	+41	95	39	0	14	707	16.1	19:33

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

40 goals and 35 assists in 67 games — 75 points — with 17 of the goals on the power play. Plus-4, 21:07 a night, 261 shots at 15.3 per cent, 45 penalty minutes.

Seventeen power-play goals is eighth in the league and he did it in sixty-seven games.

55.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 90th percentile, with his ice at 44-37 against an expectation of 48.96-38.81.

Now the number that has to be attached to all of it. He started 67.4 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone — 422 offensive-zone draws against 204 defensive ones, the fifth-highest share in the league. Minnesota gave him the easiest ice on the club and he did what a scorer does with it. The 90th-percentile chance share has to be read against that, and it is a smaller number once you do.

Three seasons, 203 games, 234 points.

The Finesse Game

261 shots at a median of 24 feet, 38 per cent from inside twenty and 17 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 47 shots on goal, 2 goals. Inside forty: 209 shots and 38 goals — 18.18 per cent.

That is the whole scoring case, and it is a good one: two hundred and nine shots from inside forty feet is enormous volume from good positions, and 18 per cent on it is genuine finishing rather than a hot month.

The type mix is unusually broad — 155 wrist, 95 snap, 36 slap, 31 backhand, 31 tip-in — and the snap-shot count is the second-highest on the club. Wrist and snap are recorded together in this book because the scorekeeping between them shifted; 250 of 370 tracked attempts.

92.7 mph at the 63rd percentile, which is ordinary, and the goals do not come from there.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 202, and 45 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.5 mph, the 64th percentile; bursts 1.4 a game, the 70th; 3.45 miles a game, the 97th percentile — the highest figure among Minnesota forwards and a defenceman’s number.

He is low and thick and very hard to knock off the puck for his height, which is how a 5-10 winger takes 209 shots a season from inside forty feet. The 45 penalty minutes are mostly the frustration of a marked man.

He missed fifteen games, which is the first significant absence of his three seasons.

The Intangibles

One hundred and thirty-fifth overall in 2015, five more seasons in Russia after the draft, and 114 goals in his first 203 NHL games.

A fifth-round pick who arrived at twenty-three already formed is the sort of thing that happens once a decade, and Minnesota has 27, 47 and 40 goals out of him in three years, the first of those in a fifty-five-game season.

The reservation is the deployment, and it is a real one. Nothing in this file tells you what he does when the shifts begin in his own end, because Minnesota has never asked him to find out.

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.

drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
55.8% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 47.8% for his club in the minutes he sat: +8.0, 98th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
15:48 a game at five-on-five, 98th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
67% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 99th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He is low and thick and very hard to knock off the puck for his height, which is how a 5-10 winger takes 209 shots a season from inside forty feet.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,059 minutes

Expected goals: 55.8%; 90th pct
Shot attempts: 55.2%; 91st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 44 for, 37 against. Expected: 49.0 and 38.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

99th

Numbers

90th

The two rank him within 9 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 — 83 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 · 67 games

Top speed: 22.5 mph; 70th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.42 a game
Distance: 3.45 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.7 mph; 82nd 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 · 1059 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 55.8% — 5.8 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,059 minutes at five-on-five — 65th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Mats Zuccarello	56.3%	52.4%	37.7%
Jared Spurgeon	61.9%	52.3%	48.3%
Sam Steel	56.6%	55.2%	47.2%

56.3% together, 52.4% for him apart and 37.7% for Zuccarello 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

375 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 45 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 38% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.