This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Mikael Backlund

The captain at 36, 32 points, and a 50.9 per cent chance share in the club's hardest minutes.

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

2008-09	CGY	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	10:44
2009-10	CGY	23	1	9	10	+5	6	0	0	0	47	2.1	12:36
2010-11	CGY	73	10	15	25	+4	18	2	0	1	144	6.9	12:05
2011-12	CGY	41	4	7	11	-13	16	2	0	2	85	4.7	15:23
2012-13	CGY	32	8	8	16	-6	29	2	0	1	88	9.1	15:07
2013-14	CGY	76	18	21	39	+4	32	5	4	3	178	10.1	18:32
2014-15	CGY	52	10	17	27	+4	14	0	2	2	103	9.7	17:45
2015-16	CGY	82	21	26	47	+10	28	3	3	4	155	13.6	16:26
2016-17	CGY	81	22	31	53	+9	36	7	0	7	197	11.2	17:36
2017-18	CGY	82	14	31	45	-21	78	3	1	2	214	6.5	19:01
2018-19	CGY	77	21	26	47	+34	52	1	1	4	205	10.2	17:54
2019-20	CGY	70	16	29	45	+3	26	3	3	3	157	10.2	17:57
2020-21	CGY	54	9	23	32	-7	30	0	1	1	144	6.3	17:36
2021-22	CGY	82	12	27	39	+16	30	0	0	1	214	5.6	17:07
2022-23	CGY	82	19	37	56	+24	36	5	1	2	260	7.3	18:10
2023-24	CGY	82	15	24	39	-4	24	2	1	2	209	7.2	19:14
2024-25	CGY	76	15	17	32	+4	32	1	1	3	175	8.6	18:44
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	1066	215	348	563	+66	487	36	18	38	2576	8.3	17:18

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

15 goals and 17 assists in 76 games for 32 points, plus-4, on 18:44 a night.

51.7 per cent at five-on-five, the 68th percentile, taking the defensive-zone starts against the other club’s best line. His on-ice goals were 33-28 against an expected 41-38, so the line was outscored while creating slightly more than it allowed.

The Finesse Game

Limited and always was. 175 shots and 15 goals at 8.6 per cent is close to his career rate, and 17 assists is thin.

What has never declined is the reading of a play. He takes away the middle of the ice, supports the puck properly, and is among the better defensive-zone faceoff centres in the league, which is why a 36-year-old with ordinary hands still plays 19 minutes a night.

The Physical Game

6 feet and 206, and honest. He wins pucks on the wall, blocks shots, and finishes checks without ever being a punishing player.

32 penalty minutes over 76 games. The durability has been remarkable — sixteen seasons, and he has cleared 70 games in eleven of them.

The Intangibles

Sixteen seasons in one organisation, the captaincy, and a career of being the least glamorous indispensable player in the league.

At 36 the legs are the whole projection and a defensive centre who arrives late is a liability rather than an asset. Nothing in last season suggests it has started; the club has no succession plan for when it 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
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.

perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
31.4% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
defensively-responsiblea strength· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“He takes away the middle of the ice, supports the puck properly”
faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“is among the better defensive-zone faceoff centres in the league”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“He wins pucks on the wall, blocks shots, and finishes checks without ever being a punishing player.”
shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it
“He wins pucks on the wall, blocks shots, and finishes checks without ever being a punishing player.”
punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“finishes checks without ever being a punishing player”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“Sixteen seasons in one organisation, the captaincy, and a career of being the least glamorous indispensable player in the league.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,038 minutes

Expected goals: 51.7%; 68th pct
Shot attempts: 52.4%; 77th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 33 for, 28 against. Expected: 41.1 and 38.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

80th

Numbers

68th

The two rank him within 12 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 78 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, 2024-25 · 76 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 48th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.34 a game
Distance: 3.08 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.0 mph; 94th 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.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 1038 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, 2024-25

The club: CGY took 48.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.7% — 3.0 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,038 minutes at five-on-five — 66th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Blake Coleman	52.8%	48.0%	49.6%
Matt Coronato	52.0%	51.3%	49.4%
Rasmus Andersson	48.8%	54.5%	48.5%

52.8% together, 48.0% for him apart and 49.6% for Coleman 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

258 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 15 of them goals. His median goal came from 22 feet. 26% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 31% from beyond forty.