This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Mattias Samuelsson
Buffalo Sabres Defense
Six foot four and 229 pounds, twenty and a half minutes a night, and forty-one games of it.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | BUF | 12 | 0 | 2 | 2 | -8 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 10 | 0.0 | 18:02 |
| 2021-22 | BUF | 42 | 0 | 10 | 10 | -10 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 44 | 0.0 | 20:00 |
| 2022-23 | BUF | 55 | 2 | 8 | 10 | +14 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 76 | 2.6 | 22:11 |
| 2023-24 | BUF | 41 | 1 | 6 | 7 | +4 | 26 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 44 | 2.3 | 20:30 |
| 2024-25 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 150 | 3 | 26 | 29 | 0 | 66 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 174 | 1.7 | 20:47 |
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
1 goal and 6 assists in 41 games — 7 points at 20:30 a night, plus-4, on 44 shots with 26 penalty minutes. He missed exactly half the season.
50.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 707 minutes, the 57th percentile. His ice went 28-28 against an expectation of 30.49-29.77 — almost exactly what the chances said.
The Finesse Game
44 attempts at a median of 54 feet, with 70 per cent from beyond 40 and 2 per cent from inside 20, converting at 2.27 per cent. Three goals in 150 NHL games.
Six assists. He does not carry the puck out and the first pass is short and safe, and there is no offensive dimension here at all. The club asks for none.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 229, and he clears the front of his own net by moving grown men out of it. He wins battles below the goal line and he finishes checks, and he is the only defenceman on this roster who does either reliably.
He blocks shots and he is the man sent out to protect a lead. 26 penalty minutes in 41 games and 66 in 150 for his career is a clean rate for a defenceman who plays this way.
The Intangibles
Thirty-second overall in 2018 and 150 NHL games across four seasons at 24, none of them a full year.
A blue line built on two first-overall picks who neither of them punish anybody needs exactly this player, and the record says he is available for about half a season. That is the whole report: the fit is perfect and the availability is not.
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.
“**6-4 and 229, and he clears the front of his own net by moving grown men out of it.** He wins battles below the goal line and he finishes checks, and he is the only defenceman on this roster who does either reliably.”
“**6-4 and 229, and he clears the front of his own net by moving grown men out of it.** He wins battles below the goal line and he finishes checks, and he is the only defenceman on this roster who does either reliably.”
“**6-4 and 229, and he clears the front of his own net by moving grown men out of it.** He wins battles below the goal line and he finishes checks, and he is the only defenceman on this roster who does either reliably.”
“**He blocks shots** and he is the man sent out to protect a lead.”
“**He blocks shots** and he is the man sent out to protect a lead.”
“**He does not carry the puck out and the first pass is short and safe**, and there is no offensive dimension here at all.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 707 minutes
- Expected goals
- 50.6%
- 58th pct
- Shot attempts
- 51.6%
- 69th 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: 28 for, 28 against. Expected: 30.5 and 29.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 41 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 652 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, 2023-24 · 41 games
- Top speed
- 22.4 mph
- 78th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.10 a game
- Distance
- 2.87 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 90.6 mph
- 42nd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.7
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
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 · 707 minutes at five-on-five
- Owen Power14%
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
- BUF took 48.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.6% — 1.7 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 707 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rasmus Dahlin | 49.8% | 51.8% | 51.9% |
| Casey Mittelstadt | 55.2% | 48.3% | 52.6% |
| JJ Peterka | 50.0% | 50.8% | 52.6% |
49.8% together, 51.8% for him apart and 51.9% for Dahlin apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.
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
60 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 2% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 70% from beyond forty.