This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →

Matt Martin

One thousand one hundred and fifteen career penalty minutes, the fourth-most in this book, and eleven minutes a night.

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

2009-10	NYI	5	0	2	2	-1	26	0	0	0	10	0.0	13:14
2010-11	NYI	68	5	9	14	-13	147	0	0	1	60	8.3	10:57
2011-12	NYI	80	7	7	14	-17	121	0	0	1	130	5.4	12:09
2012-13	NYI	48	4	7	11	-2	63	1	0	1	67	6.0	11:54
2013-14	NYI	79	8	6	14	-11	90	0	0	3	120	6.7	11:54
2014-15	NYI	78	8	6	14	-4	114	0	0	2	90	8.9	11:16
2015-16	NYI	80	10	9	19	+2	119	0	0	1	86	11.6	10:33
2016-17	TOR	82	5	4	9	0	123	0	0	0	66	7.6	8:54
2017-18	TOR	50	3	9	12	0	50	0	0	0	46	6.5	7:59
2018-19	NYI	67	6	8	14	+5	53	0	0	1	62	9.7	11:26
2019-20	NYI	55	5	3	8	-1	40	0	0	2	49	10.2	10:25
2020-21	NYI	54	6	5	11	-2	36	1	0	0	68	8.8	11:04
2021-22	NYI	71	3	4	7	-2	70	0	0	0	66	4.5	11:26
2022-23	NYI	81	7	12	19	+4	63	0	0	1	82	8.5	11:09
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	898	77	91	168	-42	1115	2	0	13	1002	7.7	10:55

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

7 goals and 12 assists in 81 games — 19 points — at 11:09 a night. Plus-4, 82 shots at 8.5 per cent, 63 penalty minutes.

43.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 13th percentile — the lowest of any Islander who played a full season. His ice finished 28-28 against an expectation of 27.6-35.5, which is seven and a half goals better than the chances at the defensive end and is Sorokin.

He started 31.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 4th percentile: 127 attacking draws against 280.

Fourteen seasons, 898 games, 168 points, and 1,115 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

82 shots at a median of 25 feet, and seven goals.

Inside twenty: 24 shots on goal and 5 goals, 20.83 per cent, which is above the league forward rate — on twenty-four shots, which is the whole of his season inside the dots. Twenty to forty: 33 shots and 2 goals. Beyond forty: 17 shots and none.

74 wrist shots and 18 tip-ins out of 123 tracked attempts. 85.1 mph at the 12th percentile.

Seventy-seven goals in 898 games. There is nothing in the offensive half of this file and there has not been for fourteen years, and the club has never once asked for it.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 215, and this is the entire report.

1,115 career penalty minutes across 898 games — the fourth-highest total in this book, behind Corey Perry, Milan Lucic and Tom Wilson, and 63 of them last season.

Top speed 21.7 mph, the 21st percentile; 0.4 bursts a game, the 19th; 1.75 miles a game, the 6th percentile. Eleven minutes a night in the bottom tenth of the league for ground covered.

He hits everything, fights when the club needs it, and protects the men in front of him. That is a role the league has spent a decade deciding it does not need, and the Islanders have spent the same decade deciding it does.

The 13th-percentile chance share is what it costs. Both facts belong in the file and neither cancels the other.

The Intangibles

One hundred and forty-eighth overall in 2008, the fifth round, and 898 games later he is thirty-four and still playing eighty-one of them.

Two seasons in Toronto in the middle are the only time he has worn another shirt.

What this book can say is that the deployment and the chance share are both real, that the club has chosen this on purpose for a decade, and that the record does not show it working. What it cannot measure is the thing the Islanders believe they are buying.

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.

durable· was available
81 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
31% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 6th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He hits everything, fights when the club needs it, and protects the men in front of him.”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“1,115 career penalty minutes across 898 games — the fourth-highest total in this book, behind Corey Perry, Milan Lucic and Tom Wilson, and 63 of them last season.”
transitionhe lacks it· carries it out; gains the line under control
“Eleven minutes a night in the bottom tenth of the league for ground covered.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 886 minutes

Expected goals: 43.7%; 14th pct
Shot attempts: 49%; 45th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 28 for, 28 against. Expected: 27.6 and 35.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

29th

Numbers

14th

The two rank him within 15 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 — 61 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 · 81 games

Top speed: 21.7 mph; 30th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.40 a game
Distance: 1.75 miles a game
Hardest shot: 85.1 mph; 37th 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 · 886 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: NYI took 49.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.7% — 6.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 886 minutes at five-on-five — 48th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Casey Cizikas	43.4%	44.4%	49.1%
Cal Clutterbuck	40.1%	46.5%	55.1%
Scott Mayfield	43.1%	44.1%	51.6%

43.4% together, 44.4% for him apart and 49.1% for Cizikas apart. Cizikas was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more than for him.

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

113 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 7 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 37% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 20% from beyond forty.