This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Mason Appleton
Winnipeg Jets Center
Forty-one games, a 79th-percentile chance share, and five goals.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | WPG | 36 | 3 | 7 | 10 | +9 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 29 | 10.3 | 8:12 |
| 2019-20 | WPG | 46 | 5 | 3 | 8 | -9 | 20 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 55 | 9.1 | 11:10 |
| 2020-21 | WPG | 56 | 12 | 13 | 25 | +11 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 88 | 13.6 | 14:25 |
| 2021-22 | SEA/WPG | 68 | 8 | 13 | 21 | -1 | 30 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 98 | 8.2 | 14:53 |
| 2022-23 | WPG | 41 | 5 | 11 | 16 | +2 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 71 | 7.0 | 16:01 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 247 | 33 | 47 | 80 | +12 | 76 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 341 | 9.7 | 13:18 |
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
5 goals and 11 assists in 41 games — 16 points — at 16:01 a night. Plus-2, 71 shots at 7.0 per cent, one on the power play, 8 penalty minutes.
Forty-one games, ended by injury.
54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 546 minutes, the 79th percentile, with his ice at 21-20 against an expectation of 26.75-22.57 — six fewer goals scored than the chances called for.
He started 48.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 40th percentile.
Five hundred and forty-six minutes is a third of a season and the percentile above should be read with that in mind.
The Finesse Game
71 shots at a median of 22 feet, with 41 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 18 per cent from beyond forty.
Inside twenty feet: 31 shots on goal and five goals — 16.13 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 22 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: 16 shots and none.
Every goal from inside twenty feet, and thirty-eight shots on goal from further out produced nothing.
93 tracked attempts in 41 games, 52 of them wrist shots and 13 tip-ins. His shot is measured at 85.8 mph, the 15th percentile.
33 goals in 247 career games at 9.7 per cent. There is no scoring here and the role does not require any.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 196 pounds, with 8 penalty minutes in 41 games and 76 in 247 career games.
2.5 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 92nd percentile, at a top speed of 22.7 mph, the 72nd, on 2.60 miles a game at the 53rd.
A very good burst count from a bottom-six forward, and it is the athletic case.
He forechecks hard and is first to the puck more often than his size suggests, and on a checking line that is the job.
He is defensively responsible and kills penalties, and eight penalty minutes in forty-one games says he does it without reaching.
The Intangibles
A hundred and sixty-eighth overall in 2015, the sixth round, five seasons, 247 games, 80 points across Winnipeg and Seattle.
33 goals and 47 assists, and a plus-12.
He is twenty-seven, a sixth-round pick who was taken in an expansion draft and traded back a year later.
A sixth-round pick with two hundred and fifty NHL games and a 79th-percentile chance share is a perfectly good third-line forward, and the caution is the same one every year: 36 games, 46, 56, 68 and 41 — he has never played more than sixty-eight.
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 forechecks hard and is first to the puck more often than his size suggests, and on a checking line that is the job.”
“He is defensively responsible and kills penalties, and eight penalty minutes in forty-one games says he does it without reaching.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 546 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.2%
- 82nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 51.3%
- 63rd 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: 21 for, 20 against. Expected: 26.8 and 22.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 20 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 — 68 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 · 41 games
- Top speed
- 22.7 mph
- 77th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.51 a game
- Distance
- 2.60 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 85.8 mph
- 40th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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
2022-23 · 546 minutes at five-on-five
- Adam Lowry47%
- Kyle Connor37%
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
- WPG took 51.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.2% — 2.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second line, 546 minutes at five-on-five — 19th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Lowry | 61.6% | 48.7% | 49.9% |
| Kyle Connor | 48.4% | 58.2% | 52.4% |
| Neal Pionk | 49.4% | 57.3% | 48.9% |
61.6% together, 48.7% for him apart and 49.9% for Lowry 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
90 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 43% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.