This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Michael Eyssimont
Tampa Bay Lightning Center
Three clubs in one season, sixty-three penalty minutes, and twelve wrap-arounds.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | WPG | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 5:49 |
| 2022-23 | WPG/SJS/TBL | 54 | 5 | 10 | 15 | +3 | 63 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 124 | 4.0 | 12:15 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 55 | 5 | 10 | 15 | +3 | 63 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 125 | 4.0 | 12:08 |
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
5 goals and 10 assists in 54 games — 15 points — at 12:15 a night across Winnipeg, San Jose and Tampa Bay. Plus-3, 124 shots at 4.0 per cent, 63 penalty minutes.
Three clubs in a season is the file’s first fact and it happened at twenty-six, in what was effectively his first NHL year.
57 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 92nd percentile, across 620 minutes, with his ice at 28-25 against an expectation of 31.39-23.72 — three goals short at the good end and one worse at the other.
He started 48.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 40th percentile, so the chance share is not a product of the deployment.
A 92nd-percentile chance share on six hundred minutes across three clubs is the most interesting number on this page and the one most likely to be an accident.
The Finesse Game
124 shots at a median of 23 feet.
Inside twenty feet: 53 shots on goal and three goals — 5.66 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 39 shots and one goal, 2.56 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 29 shots and one goal.
A quarter to a third of the league rate from every distance, on a hundred and twenty-one shots on goal. Five goals from a hundred and twenty-four shots is a 4.0 per cent shooting percentage, and on a sample this size that is somewhere between very bad luck and a genuine inability to finish.
A hundred and twenty-four shots in twelve minutes a night is a lot of shots, which is the encouraging half: he gets to the places from which forwards score and does not score from them.
178 tracked attempts, six of them slap shots and 12 wrap-arounds — a 6.7 per cent share, the third-highest of any forward in this book with a hundred attempts. 86.2 mph at the 17th percentile.
Twelve wrap-arounds is a strange and specific habit and it is the record of a forward who arrives behind the net with the puck more often than anybody expects.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 195 pounds, with 63 penalty minutes in 54 games — the third-highest rate on this roster — and the same 63 in 55 career games.
1.8 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 81st percentile, a top speed of 22.5 mph at the 63rd, 2.05 miles a game at the 18th. He sprints often on very little ground covered, which is a fourth-line forechecker’s line.
He forechecks into contact and finishes checks, and the penalty record is the cost of doing it at 195 pounds against defencemen who are bigger.
He is nasty in a way that a fifth-round pick with fifty-five NHL games has to be if he wants a sixth season.
The Intangibles
A hundred and forty-second overall in 2016, the fifth round, two seasons, 55 games, 15 points across Winnipeg, San Jose and Tampa Bay.
Five career goals. He was twenty-six before he played a full NHL season and he played it for three clubs.
He is twenty-seven, on a fourth line for a club that has won two of the last four. The 92nd-percentile chance share and the 4.0 per cent shooting percentage cannot both be the real man, and six hundred minutes is not enough to say which one is.
What is certain is the sixty-three penalty minutes and the wrap-arounds, and both of those are his own.
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.
- drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
57.0% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 50.6% for his club in the minutes he sat: +6.4, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
“He forechecks into contact and finishes checks, and the penalty record is the cost of doing it at 195 pounds against defencemen who are bigger.”
“He is nasty in a way that a fifth-round pick with fifty-five NHL games has to be if he wants a sixth season.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 620 minutes
- Expected goals
- 57%
- 93rd pct
- Shot attempts
- 56.2%
- 93rd 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, 25 against. Expected: 31.4 and 23.7.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 27 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 69 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 · 54 games
- Top speed
- 22.5 mph
- 68th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.76 a game
- Distance
- 2.05 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 86.2 mph
- 43rd 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 · 267 minutes at five-on-five
- Tomas Hertl27%
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
- TBL took 51.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 57.0% — 5.4 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 620 minutes at five-on-five — 24th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alexander Barabanov | 59.7% | 55.8% | 46.5% |
| Erik Karlsson | 62.3% | 55.1% | 50.1% |
| Logan Couture | 62.2% | 55.0% | 46.3% |
59.7% together, 55.8% for him apart and 46.5% for Barabanov apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
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
173 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 42% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.