This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Martin Necas
Colorado Avalanche Center
The return for Mikko Rantanen, an 83-point season, and the fastest man on the roster with the puck on his stick.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | CAR | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 6:54 |
| 2018-19 | CAR | 7 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 16.7 | 10:01 |
| 2019-20 | CAR | 64 | 16 | 20 | 36 | -6 | 20 | 5 | 0 | 3 | 88 | 18.2 | 14:10 |
| 2020-21 | CAR | 53 | 14 | 27 | 41 | +25 | 10 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 114 | 12.3 | 17:17 |
| 2021-22 | CAR | 78 | 14 | 26 | 40 | +5 | 32 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 159 | 8.8 | 16:11 |
| 2022-23 | CAR | 82 | 28 | 43 | 71 | +5 | 32 | 9 | 0 | 5 | 240 | 11.7 | 18:25 |
| 2023-24 | CAR | 77 | 24 | 29 | 53 | -9 | 42 | 8 | 0 | 3 | 231 | 10.4 | 17:21 |
| 2024-25 | CAR/COL | 79 | 27 | 56 | 83 | +5 | 16 | 12 | 0 | 8 | 194 | 13.9 | 19:00 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 441 | 124 | 202 | 326 | +25 | 154 | 40 | 3 | 28 | 1032 | 12.0 | 17:02 |
This Season So Far
The 2025-26 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
27 goals and 56 assists in 79 games for 83 points between Carolina and Colorado, plus-5, on 19:00 a night — a career year by 30 points, and it did not fall off after the trade.
54.9 per cent at five-on-five, the 90th percentile. 194 shots from a median of 32 feet with a quarter of them inside 20, and a 13.9 per cent conversion rate that is above his career mark and worth watching.
The Finesse Game
Among the quickest forwards in the league with the puck, and he uses it the right way: he enters with control rather than chasing a dump-in, which is the difference between speed that produces offence and speed that produces a forecheck. The hands work at that pace, which is what makes him more than a track athlete — he can beat a defenceman wide and still make a play at the end of it.
The shot is better than its reputation. 27 goals from 194 shots is a real finisher, and he is willing to take the puck to the middle rather than living on his off-wing perimeter, which was the criticism of him at 22 and is no longer true at 26.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 195, and none of it shows up as force. He does not forecheck heavily and does not win pucks along the wall; when a defenceman gets a body on him the play is usually over. 16 penalty minutes is a man who is nowhere near the traffic.
The size is useful defensively — long stick, decent reach on the backcheck — but he is a perimeter player physically and nothing in eight seasons suggests that changes.
The Intangibles
He was traded for one of the best wingers alive and immediately played the best hockey of his career, which is not nothing: some players never recover from being the other name in that sentence.
The reservation is history. It took him seven seasons to become this, and the seasons before it included stretches where the effort visibly came and went. One year at 83 points is evidence; it is not yet a habit, and Colorado is paying for the habit.
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
- he lacks itraised, and he does not have it
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.
- clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live
7 of his 27 goals late or in overtime, 99th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
- durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“he enters with control rather than chasing a dump-in, which is the difference between speed that produces offence and speed that produces a forecheck”
“he can beat a defenceman wide and still make a play at the end of it”
“He does not forecheck heavily and does not win pucks along the wall; when a defenceman gets a body on him the play is usually over.”
“He does not forecheck heavily and does not win pucks along the wall”
“16 penalty minutes is a man who is nowhere near the traffic.”
“The size is useful defensively — long stick, decent reach on the backcheck”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,086 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.9%
- 90th pct
- Shot attempts
- 58.4%
- 97th 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: 54 for, 44 against. Expected: 53.2 and 43.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 18 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 76 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, 2024-25 · 79 games
- Top speed
- 24.5 mph
- 100th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 4.68 a game
- Distance
- 3.22 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 94.6 mph
- 95th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 83.9
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
2024-25 with CAR · 650 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, 2024-25
- The club
- COL took 53.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.9% — 1.7 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 1,086 minutes at five-on-five — 73rd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jesperi Kotkaniemi | 51.6% | 57.1% | 58.3% |
| Nathan MacKinnon | 66.2% | 50.2% | 57.0% |
| Artturi Lehkonen | 63.3% | 51.5% | 54.4% |
51.6% together, 57.1% for him apart and 58.3% for Kotkaniemi 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
294 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 27 of them goals. His median goal came from 22 feet. 24% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 25% from beyond forty.