Armchair Hockey Scout

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2024-25 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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6

Mason Lohrei

Boston Bruins Defense

Six foot five and moves the puck like a smaller man — and twelve fewer goals conceded on his ice than the chances said.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2023-24BOS414913-218101439.316:57
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—414913-218101439.316:57

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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 9 assists in 41 games — 13 points at 16:57 a night, minus-2, with 1 power-play goal and 1 game-winner on 43 shots at 9.30 per cent, and 18 penalty minutes. His first NHL season, at 23.

46.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 644 minutes, the 29th percentile. His ice went 27-29 against an expectation of 24.62-28.34 — twelve fewer goals conceded than the chances predicted, which on this club was normal and belonged to the goaltender.

The Finesse Game

43 attempts at a median of 43 feet, with 57 per cent from beyond 40 and 14 per cent from inside 20, converting at 9.30 per cent.

The puck-moving is why he is here and it is genuinely good for the size — he escapes a first forechecker by turning rather than by throwing it away, and he carries it out of his own zone and gains the offensive line under control. Thirteen points in forty-one games as a rookie defenceman is a real rate.

He will attempt the pass through the middle that a coach does not want, and it goes wrong often enough to be part of the report.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 218, and he does not defend the way that suggests. He does not clear the front of his own net by force and he loses more battles in the corner than a man that size should.

18 penalty minutes in 41 games. He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the strength is a year or two away.

The Intangibles

Fifty-eighth overall in 2020, three years at Ohio State, and an NHL regular at 23.

A 6-5 defenceman who moves the puck like a 5-11 one is the most valuable single profile in the modern game, and the whole question is whether the defending catches up. Forty-one games is not an answer.

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
  • 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.

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “**he carries it out of his own zone and gains the offensive line under control.** Thirteen points in forty-one games as a rookie defenceman is a real rate.”

  • playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “**The puck-moving is why he is here and it is genuinely good for the size** — he escapes a first forechecker by turning rather than by throwing it away, and **he carries it out of his own zone and gains the offensive line under control.**”

  • clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net

    “He does not clear the front of his own net by force and he loses more battles in the corner than a man that size should.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He does not clear the front of his own net by force and he loses more battles in the corner than a man that size should.”

  • retaliateshe lacks it· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty

    “He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the strength is a year or two away.”

  • agitatorhe lacks it· gets under the skin; draws the retaliation

    “He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the strength is a year or two away.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 644 minutes

Expected goals
46.5%
29th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
45.8%
21st pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 27 for, 29 against. Expected: 24.6 and 28.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
24th
Numbers
29th

The two rank him within 5 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 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, 2023-24 · 41 games

Top speed
21.1 mph
25th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.7

Bursts over 20 mph
0.12 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.39 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
85.5 mph
21st pct

one shot; the league's average best is 90.2

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

2023-24 · 644 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, 2023-24

The club
BOS took 49.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.5% — 3.2 below the club he did it on.
The role
644 minutes at five-on-five — 28th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Charlie McAvoy43.9%48.1%52.3%
David Pastrnak47.4%45.9%53.3%
Danton Heinen48.9%45.6%50.1%

43.9% together, 48.1% for him apart and 52.3% for McAvoy 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

58 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 31 feet. 14% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 57% from beyond forty.