This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Matt Nieto
Pittsburgh Penguins Left Wing
1.6 sprints a game on 2.13 miles of ice — the shortest, fastest shifts on the roster.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | SJS | 66 | 10 | 14 | 24 | -4 | 16 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 124 | 8.1 | 14:05 |
| 2014-15 | SJS | 72 | 10 | 17 | 27 | -12 | 20 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 135 | 7.4 | 15:15 |
| 2015-16 | SJS | 67 | 8 | 9 | 17 | -8 | 10 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 90 | 8.9 | 13:10 |
| 2016-17 | SJS/COL | 59 | 7 | 6 | 13 | -12 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 85 | 8.2 | 14:56 |
| 2017-18 | COL | 74 | 15 | 11 | 26 | +6 | 14 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 84 | 17.9 | 14:55 |
| 2018-19 | COL | 64 | 4 | 19 | 23 | +2 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 86 | 4.7 | 13:46 |
| 2019-20 | COL | 70 | 8 | 13 | 21 | +7 | 6 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 85 | 9.4 | 13:30 |
| 2020-21 | SJS | 28 | 5 | 2 | 7 | -4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 45 | 11.1 | 14:00 |
| 2021-22 | SJS | 70 | 6 | 11 | 17 | -20 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 82 | 7.3 | 14:24 |
| 2022-23 | SJS/COL | 81 | 12 | 12 | 24 | -15 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 115 | 10.4 | 13:31 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 651 | 85 | 114 | 199 | -60 | 121 | 2 | 6 | 12 | 931 | 9.1 | 14:09 |
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
12 goals and 12 assists in 81 games — 24 points — at 13:31 a night between San Jose and Colorado. Minus-15, 115 shots at 10.4 per cent, two game-winners, 16 penalty minutes.
Twelve goals is his second-best total in ten seasons, behind the fifteen he scored in 2017-18.
49.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 921 minutes, the 37th percentile, with his ice at 39-48 against an expectation of 36.61-37.92 — ten goals worse at the defensive end than the chances predicted, which on a fourth line is mostly goaltending and luck rather than him.
He started 41.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 15th percentile.
The Finesse Game
115 shots at a median of 22 feet, with 45 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.
Inside twenty feet: 51 shots on goal and nine goals, 17.65 per cent, which is the league forward rate of 17.71 almost exactly. From twenty to forty: 42 shots and two goals, 4.76 per cent against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 20 shots, one goal.
A league-average finisher from close range and nothing at all from the mid-slot, on a career 9.1 per cent shooting percentage. The 10.4 last season is the best figure he has recorded in a full season since 2017-18.
147 tracked attempts: 86 wrist, 23 tip-in, 18 backhand, six slap. 86.2 mph at the 17th percentile. There is no shot here and there never was; the goals come from arriving at the net first.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 189 pounds. 1.6 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 76th percentile, on 2.13 miles a game at the 21st, with a top speed of 22.6 mph at the 69th.
That is a distinctive pair of numbers and it is the exact inverse of the shape this book keeps finding on defencemen: he covers almost no ground and sprints constantly while doing it. It is the tracking signature of very short shifts skated at full effort.
He forechecks on the first man and gets there quickly, which is the whole of his even-strength role and the reason he has killed penalties in San Jose and in Colorado.
16 penalty minutes in 81 games, and 121 in 651 career games — one of the lowest rates in this edition for a forward who plays the way he does.
The Intangibles
Forty-seventh overall in 2011, the second round, ten seasons, 651 games, 199 points across three clubs and two spells in San Jose.
85 goals and six shorthanded, which for a bottom-six winger is the shape of a career that has lasted on speed and penalty-killing rather than production.
He is thirty and has never played more than 74 games in a season before this one. What the club gets is 81 games of fourth-line minutes at the 15th percentile of zone starts, from a man who can still skate.
A minus-60 for a career is worth naming and worth discounting: he has played almost all of it on clubs that were behind.
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
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
“He forechecks on the first man and gets there quickly, which is the whole of his even-strength role and the reason he has killed penalties in San Jose and in Colorado.”
“85 goals and six shorthanded, which for a bottom-six winger is the shape of a career that has lasted on speed and penalty-killing rather than production.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 921 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.1%
- 45th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.5%
- 42nd 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: 39 for, 48 against. Expected: 36.6 and 37.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 3 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 — 65 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
- 22.6 mph
- 73rd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.57 a game
- Distance
- 2.13 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 86.2 mph
- 42nd 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 with SJS · 569 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
- COL took 52.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.1% — 3.4 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 921 minutes at five-on-five — 50th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logan Couture | 44.2% | 51.7% | 50.7% |
| Alexander Barabanov | 45.2% | 51.4% | 50.6% |
| Marc-Edouard Vlasic | 44.6% | 50.3% | 51.0% |
44.2% together, 51.7% for him apart and 50.7% for Couture 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
141 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 12 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.