Mark Giordano
Toronto Maple Leafs Defense
Forty years old, undrafted, 1,102 games, and the 92nd percentile of chance share.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005-06 | CGY | 7 | 0 | 1 | 1 | +2 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0.0 | 12:05 |
| 2006-07 | CGY | 48 | 7 | 8 | 15 | +7 | 36 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 49 | 14.3 | 13:27 |
| 2008-09 | CGY | 58 | 2 | 17 | 19 | +2 | 59 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 82 | 2.4 | 16:13 |
| 2009-10 | CGY | 82 | 11 | 19 | 30 | +17 | 81 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 111 | 9.9 | 20:50 |
| 2010-11 | CGY | 82 | 8 | 35 | 43 | -8 | 67 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 165 | 4.9 | 23:08 |
| 2011-12 | CGY | 61 | 9 | 18 | 27 | 0 | 75 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 125 | 7.2 | 23:01 |
| 2012-13 | CGY | 47 | 4 | 11 | 15 | -7 | 40 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 58 | 6.9 | 23:10 |
| 2013-14 | CGY | 64 | 14 | 33 | 47 | +12 | 63 | 7 | 0 | 2 | 180 | 7.8 | 25:14 |
| 2014-15 | CGY | 61 | 11 | 37 | 48 | +13 | 37 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 157 | 7.0 | 25:10 |
| 2015-16 | CGY | 82 | 21 | 35 | 56 | -5 | 54 | 9 | 1 | 2 | 212 | 9.9 | 24:48 |
| 2016-17 | CGY | 81 | 12 | 27 | 39 | +22 | 59 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 151 | 8.0 | 23:35 |
| 2017-18 | CGY | 82 | 13 | 25 | 38 | 0 | 63 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 214 | 6.1 | 24:47 |
| 2018-19 | CGY | 78 | 17 | 57 | 74 | +39 | 69 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 221 | 7.7 | 24:14 |
| 2019-20 | CGY | 60 | 5 | 26 | 31 | +2 | 34 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 157 | 3.2 | 23:53 |
| 2020-21 | CGY | 56 | 9 | 17 | 26 | +5 | 14 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 142 | 6.3 | 22:57 |
| 2021-22 | SEA/TOR | 75 | 8 | 27 | 35 | -9 | 57 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 151 | 5.3 | 20:52 |
| 2022-23 | TOR | 78 | 4 | 20 | 24 | +27 | 53 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 107 | 3.7 | 18:57 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 1102 | 155 | 413 | 568 | +119 | 869 | 52 | 13 | 25 | 2287 | 6.8 | 22:17 |
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
4 goals and 20 assists in 78 games — 24 points — at 18:57 a night. Plus-27, 107 shots at 3.7 per cent, one shorthanded, 53 penalty minutes.
Seventy-eight games at thirty-nine, which is the first thing to say about it.
56.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 92nd percentile — the second-best of any defenceman on this roster, behind only TJ Brodie — across 1,239 minutes, with his ice at 56-39 against an expectation of 60.46-45.80.
He started 46 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 30th percentile: 304 attacking draws against 357 defensive ones. No defenceman on this roster started further back except Simon Benoit, and Benoit’s season was in Anaheim.
The Finesse Game
107 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 75 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 7 per cent from inside twenty.
Beyond forty feet: 79 shots on goal and one goal — 1.27 per cent, well below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 20 shots and two goals, 10.00 per cent, above the league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: eight shots and one goal.
Seventy-nine shots from the point returned one goal, on an 18.3 per cent slap share and a 93.5 mph shot at the 67th percentile. That is another defenceman taking real volume from range on a middling slap share and getting nothing back for it, which by this point in the edition is the rule rather than the exception.
A 3.7 per cent shooting percentage against a career 6.8 across 1,102 games and 155 goals.
153 tracked attempts, 96 of them wrist shots. The offence has gone, and the 20 assists are what is left of it.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 202 pounds, with 53 penalty minutes in 78 games and 869 in 1,102 career games.
Top speed 22.7 mph at the 76th percentile, 0.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 13th, 2.56 miles a game at the 48th. A top speed in the top quarter of the league at thirty-nine is the most remarkable single number in this chapter, and the burst count says he reaches it about once every three games.
He is punishing, and on the hard half of a first-place club’s blue line at that age the physical game is the reason he is still there.
He gets in front of the puck as a matter of routine, and always has. Eight hundred and sixty-nine career penalty minutes say he has never been shy about the rest of it either.
He defends by position and by being early, which is the only method available once the recovery speed has gone.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, seventeen seasons, 1,102 games, 568 points across Calgary, Seattle and Toronto, and a Norris Trophy in 2018-19.
155 goals and 413 assists, and a plus-119. An undrafted defenceman with eleven hundred NHL games and a Norris is one of the two or three most improbable careers in this book.
He is forty, the oldest player in this edition, playing nineteen minutes a night with a 92nd-percentile chance share on a club that finished fourth.
That combination is not going to repeat, and it does not need to. What it records is the last thoroughly useful season of a career nobody projected at all.
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.
- durable· was available
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“An undrafted defenceman with eleven hundred NHL games and a Norris is one of the two or three most improbable careers in this book.”
“He is punishing, and on the hard half of a first-place club's blue line at that age the physical game is the reason he is still there.”
“He gets in front of the puck as a matter of routine, and always has.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,239 minutes
- Expected goals
- 56.9%
- 93rd pct
- Shot attempts
- 51.6%
- 67th 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, 39 against. Expected: 60.5 and 45.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 7 points of one another. 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.
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 — 75 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 · 78 games
- Top speed
- 22.7 mph
- 90th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.31 a game
- Distance
- 2.56 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.5 mph
- 58th 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 · 1239 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
- TOR took 54.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.9% — 2.4 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First pair, 1,239 minutes at five-on-five — 86th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Justin Holl | 56.2% | 57.5% | 50.6% |
| Michael Bunting | 57.8% | 56.5% | 55.1% |
| William Nylander | 59.9% | 55.6% | 56.8% |
56.2% together, 57.5% for him apart and 50.6% for Holl apart. Holl was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Holl than for him.
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
153 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 34 feet. 7% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 75% from beyond forty.