This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2023-24 report →
Marc Staal
Florida Panthers Defense
A thousand and nineteen NHL games, the 27th-lowest top speed of the 192 qualified defencemen, and the 4th percentile for sprints.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007-08 | NYR | 80 | 2 | 8 | 10 | +2 | 42 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 78 | 2.6 | 18:48 |
| 2008-09 | NYR | 82 | 3 | 12 | 15 | -7 | 64 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 96 | 3.1 | 21:08 |
| 2009-10 | NYR | 82 | 8 | 19 | 27 | +11 | 44 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 78 | 10.3 | 23:08 |
| 2010-11 | NYR | 77 | 7 | 22 | 29 | +8 | 50 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 116 | 6.0 | 25:44 |
| 2011-12 | NYR | 46 | 2 | 3 | 5 | -7 | 16 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 61 | 3.3 | 19:54 |
| 2012-13 | NYR | 21 | 2 | 9 | 11 | +4 | 14 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 10.0 | 24:27 |
| 2013-14 | NYR | 72 | 3 | 11 | 14 | -1 | 24 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 92 | 3.3 | 20:32 |
| 2014-15 | NYR | 80 | 5 | 15 | 20 | +18 | 42 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 97 | 5.1 | 21:08 |
| 2015-16 | NYR | 77 | 2 | 13 | 15 | +2 | 36 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 65 | 3.1 | 19:41 |
| 2016-17 | NYR | 72 | 3 | 7 | 10 | +9 | 34 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 70 | 4.3 | 19:11 |
| 2017-18 | NYR | 72 | 1 | 7 | 8 | +11 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 68 | 1.5 | 18:32 |
| 2018-19 | NYR | 79 | 3 | 10 | 13 | -9 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 84 | 3.6 | 19:25 |
| 2019-20 | NYR | 52 | 2 | 9 | 11 | +5 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 46 | 4.3 | 17:39 |
| 2020-21 | DET | 56 | 3 | 7 | 10 | -5 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 53 | 5.7 | 18:25 |
| 2021-22 | DET | 71 | 3 | 13 | 16 | -1 | 28 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 76 | 4.0 | 17:25 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 1019 | 49 | 165 | 214 | +40 | 480 | 7 | 2 | 7 | 1100 | 4.5 | 20:17 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
3 goals and 13 assists in 71 games for Detroit — 16 points and a minus-1 at 17:25 a night, the 26th percentile among defencemen — with 28 penalty minutes. 2:13 a night short-handed is the 71st percentile.
46.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,097 minutes, the 26th percentile, and 45.8 per cent of the attempts, the 15th. Detroit was 31st in the league at suppressing chances and he was among the men doing it.
The Finesse Game
3.69 shots per 60 is the 33rd percentile among defencemen and 18 per cent of them came from the slot, the 88th — a defenceman who does not shoot often and gets closer than most when he does.
0.89 even-strength points per 60 is the 41st percentile and not one of his sixteen points came on the power play. He has seven power-play goals in 1,019 NHL games.
0.63 takeaways per 60 is the 24th percentile. 89.7 mph is the 14th percentile — a soft shot from a man who has never been asked for one.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 208, and 35 years old.
21.2 mph is the 27th-lowest top speed of the 192 defencemen the tracking covers, and 0.3 bursts over 20 mph per 60 is the 4th percentile. He crossed twenty miles an hour roughly four times all season. 8.22 miles per 60 is the 25th percentile.
4.56 hits per 60 is the 56th percentile and 3.64 blocks is the 32nd. For a 6-4 defensive defenceman playing seventeen minutes on the third pair, neither is what the role is usually sold on.
0.68 penalties taken per 60 is the 55th percentile — twenty-eight minutes in seventy-one games, which at his age and his speed is a genuinely disciplined figure.
The Intangibles
Twelfth overall in 2005, and 1,019 NHL games at 35 with 214 points and a career plus-40 — fifteen seasons, thirteen of them in New York.
He is past a thousand NHL games, and the last five of those seasons have been at seventeen minutes on clubs that finished low.
Florida has Aaron Ekblad, Gustav Forsling, Brandon Montour and Radko Gudas ahead of him, and lost MacKenzie Weegar. He is the fifth or sixth defenceman on a club that won the Presidents’ Trophy, and the skating file says that is the ceiling and probably generous.
What nothing here measures is positioning and gap control, which is the whole of what a 35-year-old defensive defenceman is still being paid for.
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
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.
“What nothing here measures is positioning and gap control”
“a defenceman who does not shoot often and gets closer than most when he does”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 1,069 minutes
- Expected goals
- 46.7%
- 28th pct
- Shot attempts
- 45.8%
- 20th 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: 56 for, 60 against. Expected: 40.9 and 46.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 22 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 48 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, 2021-22 · 71 games
- Top speed
- 21.2 mph
- 35th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.10 a game
- Distance
- 2.39 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.7 mph
- 35th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.4
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
2021-22 with DET · 1069 minutes at five-on-five
- Filip Hronek42%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- DET took 45.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.7% — 1.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 1,069 minutes at five-on-five — 71st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filip Hronek | 44.4% | 48.5% | 46.5% |
| Gustav Lindström | 49.1% | 45.8% | 44.9% |
| Pius Suter | 47.6% | 46.3% | 47.2% |
44.4% together, 48.5% for him apart and 46.5% for Hronek apart. He was better away from Hronek, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Hronek.
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
97 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 50 feet. 13% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 64% from beyond forty.