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

Max Jones

The 91st percentile in sprints over twenty miles an hour and the 17th in distance — everything in short bursts.

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

2018-19	ANA	30	2	3	5	-1	14	0	0	1	58	3.5	13:10
2019-20	ANA	59	8	4	12	-6	36	0	1	0	102	7.8	14:16
2020-21	ANA	46	7	4	11	-9	36	2	0	1	77	9.1	14:10
2021-22	ANA	2	0	0	0	-1	15	0	0	0	2	0.0	9:54
2022-23	ANA	69	9	10	19	-21	77	0	0	2	107	8.4	12:43
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	206	26	21	47	-38	178	2	1	4	346	7.5	13:31

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

9 goals and 10 assists in 69 games — 19 points at 12:43 a night, minus-21, on 107 shots, converting at 8.41 per cent, and 77 penalty minutes.

40.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 837 minutes, the 5th percentile, starting 36.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking end — the 1st percentile. His ice went 23-45 against an expectation of 29.31-43.48, so six goals of scoring went missing on top of the deployment.

The Finesse Game

107 attempts at a median of 21 feet with 49 per cent from inside 20, converting at 8.41 per cent. He gets to the front of the net and the hands are not good enough to finish what he gets there.

47 points in 206 career games is the honest ceiling. He is a fourth-line winger who has been asked to play third-line minutes on a bad club, and the passing is the weakest part — 21 career assists says the play stops when it reaches him.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 216, and this is where he earns the ice. He is first man in on the forecheck and he finishes the check when he gets there, 178 penalty minutes in 206 games and a willingness to answer for it.

The tracking says something specific about how he plays: 2.4 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game, the 91st percentile, on only 2.02 miles a game, the 17th. He sprints and then he stops. That is a forechecker’s shift and nothing else, and it is a real role.

The Intangibles

Twenty-fourth overall in 2016, and seven years on he is a bottom-six winger. That is not a bust — most first-round picks are less — but it is not what a mid-first is drafted for.

He is 25 and has had two seasons interrupted by injury. The role is settled: he is the man who makes the other side’s defencemen turn and pay for it, and the only question is whether the finishing ever arrives to make it a third-line job instead of a fourth.

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.

forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He is first man in on the forecheck and he finishes the check when he gets there”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is first man in on the forecheck and he finishes the check when he gets there”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“21 career assists says the play stops when it reaches him”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 837 minutes

Expected goals: 40.3%; 5th pct
Shot attempts: 42.3%; 6th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 23 for, 45 against. Expected: 29.3 and 43.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

41st

Numbers

5th

The report ranks him 36 points above where the numbers do. 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 58 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 60 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 837 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: ANA took 39.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 40.3% — 0.6 above the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 837 minutes at five-on-five — 42nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Mason McTavish	42.3%	38.2%	41.5%
Cam Fowler	42.9%	38.8%	41.9%
Kevin Shattenkirk	36.2%	42.0%	43.9%

42.3% together, 38.2% for him apart and 41.5% for McTavish apart. He was worse away from McTavish, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than McTavish did.

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

140 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 49% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.