This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Mark Friedman
Vancouver Canucks Defense
Sixty-five NHL games in five seasons, and a 96 mph shot from a hundred and eighty-five pounds.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | PHI | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 12:33 |
| 2019-20 | PHI | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 13:35 |
| 2020-21 | PHI/PIT | 9 | 2 | 1 | 3 | +1 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 22.2 | 11:03 |
| 2021-22 | PIT | 26 | 1 | 4 | 5 | +1 | 23 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 27 | 3.7 | 13:17 |
| 2022-23 | PIT | 23 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +2 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 36 | 2.8 | 14:27 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 65 | 4 | 8 | 12 | +3 | 49 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 75 | 5.3 | 13:24 |
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 2 assists in 23 games — 3 points — at 14:27 a night for Pittsburgh. Plus-2, 36 shots at 2.8 per cent, 15 penalty minutes.
55.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 306 minutes, the 89th percentile, with his ice at 12-10 against an expectation of 14.41-11.44.
Three hundred and six minutes is a quarter of a season and this book will not read a percentile off it as though it were one.
He started 53.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 66th percentile: 81 attacking draws against 71 defensive ones. Sheltered, in short spells, as a seventh defenceman is.
The Finesse Game
36 shots at a median of 46 feet, with 63 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.
Beyond forty feet: 23 shots on goal and one goal. From twenty to forty: eight shots and none. Inside twenty: three shots and none. Thirty-four shots on goal is not a sample and nothing here means anything on its own.
51 tracked attempts, 11 of them slap shots, and a shot measured at 96.6 mph, the 87th percentile — from a hundred and eighty-five pounds, which is the one genuinely interesting number in the file.
Four goals in 65 career games. There is no offensive record to speak of and nobody is buying one.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 185 pounds, which is small for a defenceman, with 15 penalty minutes in 23 games and 49 in 65 career games — a high rate for a man who plays a quarter of the season.
Top speed 22.3 mph at the 52nd percentile, 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 30th, 1.98 miles a game at the 15th, which is ice time rather than effort.
He plays much bigger than 185 pounds and takes the penalties that come with it, which at his size against forwards in the crease is the only way a seventh defenceman gets noticed.
He blocks shots and finishes checks, and the willingness has never been the question.
The feet are ordinary and the reading of the play is ordinary, and that combination at 185 pounds is why sixty-five games is what five seasons have produced.
The Intangibles
Eighty-sixth overall in 2014, the third round, five seasons, 65 games, 12 points across Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Four goals and eight assists, and a plus-3.
He is twenty-seven, a right-handed depth defenceman, and the honest projection is twenty games and a great deal of time in the press box.
Every roster in this book has three or four of these files and most of them do not get written. Sixty-five NHL games in five seasons from a third-round pick is a career that has not happened yet and is running out of time to.
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 plays much bigger than 185 pounds and takes the penalties that come with it, which at his size against forwards in the crease is the only way a seventh defenceman gets noticed.”
“He blocks shots and finishes checks, and the willingness has never been the question.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 306 minutes
- Expected goals
- 55.8%
- 90th pct
- Shot attempts
- 54%
- 85th 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, 10 against. Expected: 14.4 and 11.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 37 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 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 · 23 games
- Top speed
- 22.3 mph
- 80th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.61 a game
- Distance
- 1.98 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 96.6 mph
- 82nd 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 90.0
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 with PIT · 306 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
- PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.8% — 2.8 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 306 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evgeni Malkin | 53.4% | 57.2% | 55.0% |
| Jason Zucker | 53.6% | 57.0% | 55.7% |
| Brian Dumoulin | 49.9% | 58.0% | 50.6% |
53.4% together, 57.2% for him apart and 55.0% for Malkin apart. He was better away from Malkin, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Malkin.
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
49 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 43 feet. 12% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 63% from beyond forty.