This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Luke Kunin
San Jose Sharks Center
Forty-two penalty minutes in thirty-one games, and a hundred and ninety-seven pounds of it.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | MIN | 19 | 2 | 2 | 4 | -3 | 13 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 32 | 6.3 | 12:59 |
| 2018-19 | MIN | 49 | 6 | 11 | 17 | -9 | 27 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 88 | 6.8 | 15:53 |
| 2019-20 | MIN | 63 | 15 | 16 | 31 | -10 | 55 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 128 | 11.7 | 15:28 |
| 2020-21 | NSH | 38 | 10 | 9 | 19 | +3 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 71 | 14.1 | 13:59 |
| 2021-22 | NSH | 82 | 13 | 9 | 22 | -11 | 99 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 125 | 10.4 | 13:50 |
| 2022-23 | SJS | 31 | 5 | 8 | 13 | -9 | 42 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 58 | 8.6 | 15:26 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 282 | 51 | 55 | 106 | -39 | 249 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 502 | 10.2 | 14:42 |
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
5 goals and 8 assists in 31 games — 13 points — at 15:26 a night. Minus-9, 58 shots at 8.6 per cent, two on the power play, 42 penalty minutes.
Thirty-one games. It is the shortest season of a six-year career and the file is thin because of it.
45.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 369 minutes, the 17th percentile, with his ice at 12-19 against an expectation of 11.95-14.41.
He started 45 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 28th percentile.
The Finesse Game
58 shots at a median of 29 feet.
Inside twenty feet: 19 shots on goal and three goals — 15.79 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 18 shots and two goals, 11.11, on the league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 17 shots and none.
On 54 shots on goal that is a distribution and not a finding. The career figure is more useful: 51 goals in 282 games at 10.2 per cent, which is an ordinary bottom-six rate.
83 tracked attempts, 15 of them tip-ins — an 18.1 per cent share — and three slap shots.
85.0 mph at the 12th percentile. There is no shot here and the goals come from the net front, which for a 6-0 centre who plays the way he does is the only place they were ever going to come from.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 197 pounds, and this is the file.
42 penalty minutes in 31 games, against 249 in 282 career games — nearly a minute a game for a career.
1.6 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 76th percentile, a top speed of 22.3 mph at the 52nd, 2.23 miles a game at the 26th. He is quick in short bursts on very little ground covered, which is a fifteen-minute checking line’s tracking signature.
He is nasty and he retaliates. The 99 penalty minutes he took in Nashville in 2021-22 and the 42 in thirty-one games last season are not shot-blocking minutes; they are the record of a forward who finishes every check and then answers for it.
He takes liberties after the whistle, which is a real part of what a fourth line is for and is also why the plus-minus follows him around.
The Intangibles
Fifteenth overall in 2016, six seasons, 282 games, 106 points across Minnesota, Nashville and San Jose.
51 goals and 55 assists. The 31-point season in Minnesota in 2019-20 is the peak and he has been a third-line forward since.
He is twenty-five, which is young enough that the thirty-one games last season are an interruption rather than a decline. A first-round pick who has become a physical bottom-six centre is not a failure; it is the ordinary outcome for a fifteenth pick.
What San Jose needs from him is the 42 penalty minutes and the checking, and on a club this thin he will get more ice time than that role usually earns.
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
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.
“He is nasty and he retaliates.”
“He takes liberties after the whistle, which is a real part of what a fourth line is for and is also why the plus-minus follows him around.”
“There is no shot here and the goals come from the net front, which for a 6-0 centre who plays the way he does is the only place they were ever going to come from.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 369 minutes
- Expected goals
- 45.3%
- 22nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 41.6%
- 4th 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: 12 for, 19 against. Expected: 11.9 and 14.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 48 points above where the numbers do. 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 — 70 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 · 31 games
- Top speed
- 22.3 mph
- 58th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.61 a game
- Distance
- 2.23 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 85.0 mph
- 35th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 · 369 minutes at five-on-five
- Nico Sturm36%
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
- SJS took 48.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 45.3% — 3.2 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 369 minutes at five-on-five — 9th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nick Bonino | 39.2% | 52.5% | 52.5% |
| Marc-Edouard Vlasic | 43.1% | 46.8% | 50.8% |
| Matt Benning | 40.7% | 48.0% | 46.5% |
39.2% together, 52.5% for him apart and 52.5% for Bonino 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
79 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 34% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 28% from beyond forty.