Max Willman
Philadelphia Flyers Center
A rookie season at eleven minutes a night out of the 30th-most buried chair of 652 skaters.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | PHI | 41 | 4 | 2 | 6 | -13 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 65 | 6.2 | 11:46 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 41 | 4 | 2 | 6 | -13 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 65 | 6.2 | 11:46 |
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
41 games, 4 goals and 2 assists at 11:46 a night, minus-13, sixteen penalty minutes, 65 shots. One hundred and twenty-first overall in 2014 by Buffalo, and it took eight years and a different organisation to produce a first NHL game.
Four hundred and sixty-two minutes of five-on-five ice is short of the five hundred this book requires before it will place a man in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.
The Finesse Game
He started 33.2 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end — the 30th-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts. Seventy-seven in the attacking end against 155 in his own.
Philadelphia gave three of the fifty hardest chairs in hockey to Patrick Brown, Zack MacEwen and Max Willman, and all three of them were fourth-line forwards on a club that finished 29th.
42.9 per cent of the expected goals across 462 five-on-five minutes. His ice went 12-25 against an expectation of 15.86-21.07 — four goals short going forward and four more against than the model asked, which on a sample this size is one bad fortnight either way.
Sixty-five shots produced four goals, from a 33-foot median with twenty-eight per cent from the slot. His top shot speed is 83.7 mph, the 8th percentile of the 568 skaters the tracking covers — the softest shot on this roster by a distance.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 184 pounds, and sixteen penalty minutes came out of forty-one games. There is not enough ice here to say more.
The Intangibles
22.1 mph and 1.9 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game, both drawn from forty-one games and neither comparable to a full season — a maximum scales with the number of shifts a man takes.
2.04 miles a game is the 15th percentile of the 568 skaters the tracking measures, which at 11:46 a night is the shift length rather than the skater.
He is 27 and had never played an NHL game before this one. The chair says fourth-line penalty-kill forward, the shot speed says the scoring will not come, and forty-one games at twenty-seven is a career that has arrived exactly as late as a fifth-round pick’s usually does.
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
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.
- perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
34.6% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 97th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
- hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
33% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 5th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 462 minutes
- Expected goals
- 42.9%
- 9th pct
- Shot attempts
- 42.1%
- 4th 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: 12 for, 25 against. Expected: 15.9 and 21.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 17 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 55 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 · 41 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 48th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.88 a game
- Distance
- 2.04 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 83.7 mph
- 34th 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 · 462 minutes at five-on-five
- Zack MacEwen34%
- Morgan Frost23%
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
- PHI took 46.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.9% — 3.1 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 462 minutes at five-on-five — 16th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zack MacEwen | 40.3% | 44.3% | 38.8% |
| Travis Sanheim | 45.3% | 41.7% | 48.7% |
| Keith Yandle | 30.5% | 49.0% | 44.2% |
40.3% together, 44.3% for him apart and 38.8% for MacEwen apart. He was better away from MacEwen, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost MacEwen.
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
78 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 25 feet. 28% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 35% from beyond forty.