Matt Luff
Detroit Red Wings Right Wing
Twenty-three games, 210 minutes, and 48 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | LAK | 33 | 8 | 3 | 11 | -2 | 9 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 45 | 17.8 | 11:07 |
| 2019-20 | LAK | 18 | 1 | 4 | 5 | -5 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 25 | 4.0 | 10:22 |
| 2020-21 | LAK | 13 | 1 | 0 | 1 | -4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 5.6 | 10:29 |
| 2021-22 | NSH | 23 | 3 | 3 | 6 | +3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 26 | 11.5 | 9:24 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 87 | 13 | 10 | 23 | -8 | 20 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 114 | 11.4 | 10:25 |
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
3 goals and 3 assists in 23 games for Nashville — 6 points and a plus-3 at 9:24 a night.
Twenty-three games and 210 minutes is far short of the 40 games and 500 minutes this book requires, so there is no peer group and nothing here is a percentile. 47.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across three and a half hours; his ice went 10-6 against an expectation of 7.27-7.89.
Three and a half hours is a fortnight of hockey. Nothing in this section should be read as a season.
The Finesse Game
Twenty-six shots in twenty-three games. The median travels 23 feet and 48 per cent came from inside twenty — a close chart, three goals off it.
No power-play time. He has one power-play goal in 87 NHL games.
84.8 mph off the stick, which is soft, on a sample of shifts too small to say whether that is him.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 219. 21.0 mph top speed and 1.43 miles a game, both very low, and both what nine minutes a night produces: a top speed is the fastest he happened to go, and twenty-three games is a quarter of the chances at a high one.
Four penalty minutes in twenty-three games.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, and 87 NHL games at 25 across four seasons — thirty-three, eighteen, thirteen and twenty-three.
Thirteen goals and twenty-three points is the whole record, and the best of it was eight goals in thirty-three games as a rookie in Los Angeles.
He went undrafted and has spent four years being recalled and returned, which is the career that start usually buys. A 25-year-old winger with four partial seasons is a depth signing and this book has nothing further to say about him. What it can say is that the shot chart is close to the net, which is the only place a fourth-liner should be shooting from, and that everything else is a sample too small to argue with.
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.
“He went undrafted and has spent four years being recalled and returned, which is the career that start usually buys.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 210 minutes
- Expected goals
- 47.9%
- 38th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.4%
- 39th 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: 10 for, 6 against. Expected: 7.3 and 7.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 37 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 44 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 · 23 games
- Top speed
- 21.0 mph
- 14th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.57 a game
- Distance
- 1.43 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 84.8 mph
- 37th 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 84.1
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 with NSH · 210 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, 2021-22
- The club
- NSH took 49.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.9% — 1.7 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 210 minutes at five-on-five — 1st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michael McCarron | 53.5% | 42.4% | 47.5% |
| Roman Josi | 43.9% | 51.2% | 51.7% |
| Nick Cousins | 52.6% | 45.4% | 49.9% |
53.5% together, 42.4% for him apart and 47.5% for McCarron 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
31 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 8 feet. 48% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 26% from beyond forty.