Markus Niemelainen
Edmonton Oilers Defense
Six foot five, twenty games, and 87 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty feet.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | EDM | 20 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -5 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 0.0 | 13:12 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 20 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -5 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 0.0 | 13:12 |
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
0 goals and 1 assist in 20 games — a minus-5 and 4 penalty minutes at 13:12 a night, in his first NHL season at 23.
Twenty games and 234 minutes is nowhere near the 40 games and 500 minutes this book requires, so there is no peer group and nothing below is a percentile. 44.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across those 234 minutes — under four hours of hockey.
Four hours is a long weekend. Nothing in this section is a season and none of it should be read as one.
The Finesse Game
Twelve shots in twenty games, none of which went in. The median travels 56 feet and 87 per cent of his attempts came from beyond forty — the most distant shot chart on the Edmonton blue line and the sample is twelve shots.
No power-play time, and one assist in twenty games. 93.6 mph off the stick, which is respectable.
The Physical Game
6-5 and 200, which is very tall and very light for it.
21.6 mph top speed and 1.86 miles a game. Four penalty minutes in twenty games, which for a man that size is either restraint or a role that never put him in a position to foul, and 234 minutes cannot tell the two apart.
The reach is the whole argument for a 6-5 defenceman and nothing in this repo measures it. What the repo has is hits and blocks, which are the events that happen after the reach has failed, and twenty games of them is not evidence.
The Intangibles
Sixty-third overall in 2016, the third round, and twenty NHL games at 24.
Six years between the draft and a first NHL game. A third-round defenceman who reaches the league at 23 is at the edge of a roster, not in it, and Edmonton has Darnell Nurse, Brett Kulak, Ryan Murray and Philip Broberg on the same side.
This is a call-up and the book records it as one.
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.
“The reach is the whole argument for a 6-5 defenceman and nothing in this repo measures it.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 234 minutes
- Expected goals
- 44.4%
- 15th pct
- Shot attempts
- 47.8%
- 36th 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: 6 for, 11 against. Expected: 8.6 and 10.7.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 6 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 50 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 · 20 games
- Top speed
- 21.6 mph
- 53rd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.40 a game
- Distance
- 1.86 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.6 mph
- 59th 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 · 234 minutes at five-on-five
- Tyson Barrie32%
- Cody Ceci18%
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
- EDM took 51.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.4% — 6.9 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 234 minutes at five-on-five — 3rd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tyson Barrie | 34.8% | 48.6% | 50.1% |
| Leon Draisaitl | 50.7% | 41.8% | 50.2% |
| Kailer Yamamoto | 43.9% | 44.6% | 48.5% |
34.8% together, 48.6% for him apart and 50.1% for Barrie 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
15 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 0 of them goals. 7% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 87% from beyond forty.