Marco Scandella

Thirty-six attacking draws against a hundred and twenty defensive ones, in twenty games.

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

2010-11	MIN	20	0	2	2	-9	2	0	0	0	13	0.0	14:58
2011-12	MIN	63	3	9	12	-22	19	1	0	1	77	3.9	21:47
2012-13	MIN	6	1	0	1	-1	4	0	0	0	7	14.3	14:26
2013-14	MIN	76	3	14	17	+10	20	0	0	1	80	3.8	18:49
2014-15	MIN	64	11	12	23	+8	56	1	0	4	112	9.8	21:43
2015-16	MIN	73	5	16	21	+6	22	2	0	0	126	4.0	20:42
2016-17	MIN	71	4	9	13	-2	25	0	0	0	88	4.5	18:20
2017-18	BUF	82	5	17	22	-15	37	0	0	1	138	3.6	23:19
2018-19	BUF	63	6	7	13	-13	26	0	0	1	83	7.2	17:37
2019-20	BUF/MTL/STL	62	4	9	13	+14	20	0	0	0	77	5.2	17:35
2020-21	STL	49	3	6	9	+14	24	0	0	1	55	5.5	19:57
2021-22	STL	70	3	11	14	+17	18	0	0	0	76	4.0	18:08
2022-23	STL	20	1	1	2	+2	6	0	0	0	17	5.9	17:50
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	719	49	113	162	+9	279	4	0	9	949	5.2	19:37

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

1 goal and 1 assist in 20 games — 2 points — at 17:50 a night. Plus-2, 17 shots at 5.9 per cent, 6 penalty minutes.

Twenty games is the shortest season of a thirteen-year career, and 17:50 is a first-pair workload inside it.

39.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 304 minutes, the 2nd percentile — the lowest of any St. Louis defenceman — with his ice at 19-14 against an expectation of 10.27-15.54.

He started 23.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone: 36 attacking draws against 120 defensive ones. That is the 1st percentile, and it is by some distance the hardest deployment on this roster.

Three hundred and four minutes is a month of a regular’s season and the chance share should be read with the deployment beside it, not on its own.

The Finesse Game

17 shots at a median of 47 feet, with 63 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 12 shots on goal and one goal. From twenty to forty: five shots and none. Inside twenty: no shots on goal at all.

Seventeen shots is not a distribution. The career figure is the useful one: 49 goals in 719 games at a 5.2 per cent shooting percentage, and 113 assists.

19 tracked attempts, three of them slap shots. 85.8 mph at the 15th percentile — a soft shot for a defenceman, and one he has used sparingly for thirteen years.

The puck goes off the glass or to the near winger. There is no offensive part of the file and there has not been since about 2015.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 212 pounds. Top speed 22.1 mph at the 41st percentile, 0.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 23rd, 2.58 miles a game at the 51st.

An ordinary tracking line at thirty-three, and adequate for the eighteen minutes the club gave him.

6 penalty minutes in 20 games and 279 in 719 career games. He plays a physical game at the net front without taking many minor penalties for it.

He defends with weight and clears the front of his own net, which is the whole reason a club gives a man the 1st percentile of zone starts.

The Intangibles

Fifty-fifth overall in 2008, the second round, thirteen seasons, 719 games, 162 points across Minnesota, Buffalo, Montreal and St. Louis.

49 goals and a plus-9 across thirteen years, and 279 penalty minutes.

He is thirty-three and played twenty games last season. What the file says is a defensive defenceman near the end, on a rebuilding club, who was still being sent out for the hardest shift on the roster when he was fit to play it.

That last fact is worth more than the two points.

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.

hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
23% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 0th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He defends with weight and clears the front of his own net, which is the whole reason a club gives a man the 1st percentile of zone starts.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He plays a physical game at the net front without taking many minor penalties for it.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 304 minutes

Expected goals: 39.8%; 4th pct
Shot attempts: 41.6%; 4th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 19 for, 14 against. Expected: 10.3 and 15.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

38th

Numbers

4th

The report ranks him 34 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 — 63 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 · 20 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 70th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.45 a game
Distance: 2.58 miles a game
Hardest shot: 85.8 mph; 20th 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 · 304 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: STL took 45.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 39.8% — 6.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: 304 minutes at five-on-five — 6th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Justin Faulk	36.3%	47.5%	44.8%
Brayden Schenn	33.3%	42.7%	44.8%
Pavel Buchnevich	48.1%	36.0%	48.9%

36.3% together, 47.5% for him apart and 44.8% for Faulk 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

19 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 60 feet. 0% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 74% from beyond forty.