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

Marcus Foligno

Ninety-seven penalty minutes in sixty-five games, and twenty-one points.

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

2011-12	BUF	14	6	7	13	+6	9	2	0	1	23	26.1	15:49
2012-13	BUF	47	5	13	18	-4	41	1	0	0	55	9.1	13:38
2013-14	BUF	74	7	12	19	-17	82	0	1	3	79	8.9	15:04
2014-15	BUF	57	8	12	20	-5	50	0	0	0	66	12.1	16:14
2015-16	BUF	75	10	13	23	+4	79	0	2	2	81	12.3	13:11
2016-17	BUF	80	13	10	23	-1	73	0	1	0	97	13.4	15:28
2017-18	MIN	77	8	15	23	+2	72	1	0	2	79	10.1	10:52
2018-19	MIN	82	7	12	19	-1	55	0	0	0	91	7.7	11:58
2019-20	MIN	59	11	14	25	+8	30	0	0	0	86	12.8	14:35
2020-21	MIN	39	11	15	26	+19	49	0	1	2	40	27.5	14:58
2021-22	MIN	74	23	19	42	+25	112	5	0	3	98	23.5	16:24
2022-23	MIN	65	7	14	21	-6	97	0	0	0	83	8.4	14:59
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	743	116	156	272	+30	749	9	5	13	878	13.2	14:14

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

7 goals and 14 assists in 65 games — 21 points — with 97 penalty minutes. Minus-6, 14:59 a night, 83 shots at 8.4 per cent.

The season before he had 42 points and 112 penalty minutes. The points halved and the penalties did not.

48.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 38th percentile, with his ice at 26-28 against an expectation of 30.99-33.36 — five short at the offensive end and five better at the defensive, on the third line of a club that finished twenty-ninth in finishing.

Twelve seasons, 743 games, 272 points.

The Finesse Game

83 shots at a median of 24 feet, 42 per cent from inside twenty and 17 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 17 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 65 shots, 7 goals, 10.77 per cent.

Eighty-three shots in sixty-five games from fifteen minutes a night is a low rate. The 2021-22 figure of 23 goals is more than double any other season he has had; 5 to 13 is the record.

92.5 mph at the 62nd percentile, on four slap shots.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 226, and 97 penalty minutes in 65 games — his seventh season above fifty.

Top speed 21.7 mph, the 22nd percentile; bursts 0.7 a game, the 35th; 2.35 miles a game, the 34th. He is slow by every measure the feed takes.

What he supplies is weight and willingness. He forechecks the first man hard, finishes every check, fights when it is required and clears the front of his own net on the penalty kill. That is the entire job and he has done it for twelve years.

On a Minnesota forward group where the two best players weigh 202 and 181 pounds, somebody has to.

The Intangibles

One hundred and fourth overall in 2009 to Buffalo, six seasons there, and six in Minnesota since.

41.0 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 15th percentile.

He is thirty-two with a body that has taken twelve years of this, and 65 games is his fewest in a full-length season since 2014-15. What he does does not age well, and there is no version of this player who compensates by scoring.

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.

forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks the first man hard, finishes every check, fights when it is required and clears the front of his own net on the penalty kill.”
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He forechecks the first man hard, finishes every check, fights when it is required and clears the front of his own net on the penalty kill.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He forechecks the first man hard, finishes every check, fights when it is required and clears the front of his own net on the penalty kill.”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“What he supplies is weight and willingness.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 847 minutes

Expected goals: 48.2%; 38th pct
Shot attempts: 49.5%; 48th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 26 for, 28 against. Expected: 31.0 and 33.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

70th

Numbers

38th

The report ranks him 32 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 · 65 games

Top speed: 21.7 mph; 32nd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.68 a game
Distance: 2.35 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.5 mph; 81st 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 · 847 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 48.2% — 1.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 847 minutes at five-on-five — 44th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Joel Eriksson Ek	54.0%	42.1%	51.0%
Matt Dumba	44.5%	50.8%	50.9%
Jared Spurgeon	54.1%	45.1%	52.3%

54.0% together, 42.1% for him apart and 51.0% for Eriksson Ek 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

122 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 7 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 43% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.