This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Mats Zuccarello

Five foot eight, thirty-five years old, and sixty-seven points at twenty minutes a night.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2010-11	NYR	42	6	17	23	+3	4	0	0	2	74	8.1	14:10
2011-12	NYR	10	2	1	3	0	6	1	0	1	10	20.0	10:03
2012-13	NYR	15	3	5	8	+10	8	0	0	0	27	11.1	16:25
2013-14	NYR	77	19	40	59	+11	32	4	1	4	170	11.2	17:08
2014-15	NYR	78	15	34	49	+17	45	0	0	3	154	9.7	17:16
2015-16	NYR	81	26	35	61	+2	34	7	0	4	166	15.7	18:29
2016-17	NYR	80	15	44	59	+15	26	5	0	3	189	7.9	18:50
2017-18	NYR	80	16	37	53	-10	36	1	0	3	178	9.0	18:55
2018-19	NYR/DAL	48	12	28	40	-8	24	3	0	1	104	11.5	19:51
2019-20	MIN	65	15	22	37	-9	18	3	0	2	96	15.6	15:56
2020-21	MIN	42	11	24	35	+9	8	3	0	0	74	14.9	16:41
2021-22	MIN	70	24	55	79	+21	24	7	0	2	159	15.1	18:35
2022-23	MIN	78	22	45	67	-3	26	9	0	3	198	11.1	20:12
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	766	186	387	573	+58	291	43	1	28	1599	11.6	17:52

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

22 goals and 45 assists in 78 games — 67 points — at 20:12 a night. Minus-3, 198 shots at 11.1 per cent, 26 penalty minutes, nine on the power play.

Seventy-nine points at thirty-four in 2021-22 and sixty-seven at thirty-five in this one. There is no decline visible yet.

51.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 65th percentile, with his ice at 43-43 against an expectation of 51.90-48.22 — nine goals short at the offensive end, which on a club that finished twenty-ninth in finishing is the club and not the man.

Thirteen seasons, 766 games, 573 points.

The Finesse Game

198 shots at a median of 31 feet, 28 per cent from inside twenty and 29 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 60 shots on goal, 2 goals. Inside forty: 135 shots, 20 goals, 14.81 per cent.

Sixty long shots is the highest count among Minnesota forwards and the least useful thing in his game — 3.33 per cent from out there. Forty-five assists is what he is for.

139 wrist and 76 snap out of 279 tracked attempts, and only twenty-five slap shots. 87.8 mph at the 29th percentile, on a man who has never needed the shot.

The Physical Game

5-8 and 181, one of the shortest forwards in the league, and 26 penalty minutes in 78 games.

Top speed 22.0 mph, the 37th percentile; bursts 0.4 a game, the 23rd; 3.00 miles a game, the 80th.

He covers a lot of ground at no speed at all, which at thirty-five is what it sounds like. What he has instead is the puck: he holds it below the goal line and behind the net until a lane opens, and at 5-8 that is an act of stubbornness as much as of skill.

He does not forecheck and does not win pucks by force. He waits for them.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Norway by way of Sweden, signed by the Rangers at twenty-two, and 573 points since.

64.2 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 97th percentile.

He is thirty-six in this edition’s season and plays twenty minutes a night on the first line of a playoff club. Everything about that is unlikely, and this book records that it has been true for three years running.

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.

perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
29.3% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 92nd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
durable· was available
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
15:22 a game at five-on-five, 96th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
64% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 97th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“**Undrafted**, out of Norway by way of Sweden, signed by the Rangers at twenty-two, and 573 points since.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“What he has instead is the puck: he holds it below the goal line and behind the net until a lane opens, and at 5-8 that is an act of stubbornness as much as of skill.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck and does not win pucks by force.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,198 minutes

Expected goals: 51.8%; 65th pct
Shot attempts: 52.4%; 74th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 43 for, 43 against. Expected: 51.9 and 48.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

78th

Numbers

65th

The two rank him within 13 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 — 72 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: 22.0 mph; 45th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.45 a game
Distance: 3.00 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.8 mph; 54th pct

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 · 1198 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: MIN took 50.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.8% — 1.8 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,198 minutes at five-on-five — 83rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Kirill Kaprizov	56.3%	37.7%	52.4%
Ryan Hartman	53.0%	51.1%	52.4%
Jared Spurgeon	56.2%	49.5%	50.8%

56.3% together, 37.7% for him apart and 52.4% for Kaprizov 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

287 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 27 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 28% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 29% from beyond forty.