Photo by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Michael McCarron

6-6, 93 penalty minutes, and the most difficult minus-16 on the roster to interpret.

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

2015-16	MTL	20	1	1	2	-10	37	0	0	0	41	2.4	11:41
2016-17	MTL	31	1	4	5	-4	41	0	0	0	31	3.2	9:53
2017-18	MTL	18	0	1	1	-1	32	0	0	0	15	0.0	8:46
2020-21	NSH	6	0	0	0	+1	16	0	0	0	3	0.0	10:18
2021-22	NSH	51	7	7	14	+10	70	0	1	2	51	13.7	10:23
2022-23	NSH	32	2	2	4	-3	24	0	0	0	39	5.1	10:33
2023-24	NSH	70	12	10	22	+4	100	0	0	3	94	12.8	12:46
2024-25	NSH	74	5	9	14	-21	102	0	0	1	80	6.3	13:45
2025-26	NSH/MIN	79	8	9	17	-16	93	0	2	1	109	7.3	14:02
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	381	36	43	79	-40	515	0	3	7	463	7.8	12:12

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 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

8 goals and 17 points in 79 games on 14 minutes a night, with 93 penalty minutes — the most on the team — and a minus-16 that is the worst mark by a distance.

The Physical Game

The reason he is in the lineup. 6-6 and 232, and he uses it on the forecheck and in front of the net. He is genuinely difficult to move, he fights, and he changes the temperature of a game when a coach wants it changed.

93 penalty minutes at 14 minutes a night is a lot, and not all of it is useful; a share of those are the kind that put his own team down a man in a close game.

The Finesse Game

Better than the frame suggests around the net, and not good enough anywhere else. He can finish a rebound and handle a puck in a phone box. He cannot beat a defenceman, cannot make a play at speed, and does not shoot from distance with any purpose.

The skating is heavy. He arrives, but late.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick who spent years in the minors before turning himself into a genuine NHL fourth-liner, which takes a particular kind of stubbornness.

The minus-16 is the honest problem. Whatever the deployment, a fourth-line forward who is on the ice for that many goals against is difficult to keep in a lineup once the club has a younger option.

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.

durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
29% 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, 2025-26 · 914 minutes

Expected goals: 48%; 37th pct
Shot attempts: 48.4%; 41st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 20 for, 40 against. Expected: 32.5 and 35.2.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

44th

Numbers

37th

The two rank him within 7 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

Both bars are percentiles among the 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 71 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, 2025-26 · 79 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 48th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.08 a game
Distance: 2.29 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.3 mph; 79th pct

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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 2 goals, 1 assists, 16 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 with NSH · 703 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, 2025-26

The club: MIN took 50.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.0% — 2.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: 914 minutes at five-on-five — 50th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Cole Smith	48.1%	47.9%	52.3%
Brady Skjei	42.1%	50.5%	48.5%
Nick Perbix	45.5%	48.9%	45.1%

48.1% together, 47.9% for him apart and 52.3% for Smith apart. Smith was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more than for him.

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

163 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 8 of them goals. His median goal came from 11 feet. 50% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 25% from beyond forty.