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

Mikael Granlund

Thirty-one assists and ten goals, and nothing at all from beyond forty feet.

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

2012-13	MIN	27	2	6	8	-4	6	0	0	0	36	5.6	13:11
2013-14	MIN	63	8	33	41	-3	22	2	0	2	104	7.7	17:19
2014-15	MIN	68	8	31	39	+17	20	0	0	2	99	8.1	17:54
2015-16	MIN	82	13	31	44	-12	20	2	1	3	160	8.1	18:07
2016-17	MIN	81	26	43	69	+23	12	7	3	4	177	14.7	18:49
2017-18	MIN	77	21	46	67	+13	18	7	1	2	193	10.9	18:47
2018-19	MIN/NSH	79	16	38	54	-8	24	2	2	5	189	8.5	18:21
2019-20	NSH	63	17	13	30	-4	28	4	1	4	130	13.1	17:48
2020-21	NSH	51	13	14	27	-1	14	5	0	1	74	17.6	19:28
2021-22	NSH	80	11	53	64	-9	33	3	0	3	117	9.4	20:25
2022-23	NSH/PIT	79	10	31	41	-15	20	1	0	1	121	8.3	17:49
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	750	145	339	484	-3	217	33	8	27	1400	10.4	18:18

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

10 goals and 31 assists in 79 games — 41 points — at 17:49 a night between Nashville and Pittsburgh. Minus-15, 121 shots at 8.3 per cent, one on the power play, one game-winner, 20 penalty minutes.

47.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,038 minutes, the 29th percentile, with his ice at 36-42 against an expectation of 43.27-47.41 — seven goals short at the good end and five better at the other.

He started 51.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 54th percentile.

Forty-one points is his lowest total in a season of seventy games or more since 2015-16.

The Finesse Game

121 shots at a median of 25 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 53 shots on goal and six goals — 11.32 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 45 shots and four goals, 8.89 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 23 shots and none.

Below the rate at every distance on 121 shots. An 8.3 per cent shooting percentage against a career 10.4, which is a modest gap, and a career 10.4 for a first-line forward is itself the finding: he is not a finisher and has never pretended to be one.

339 career assists against 145 goals is the shape of the file. He is a distributor at 5-10 who plays a possession game from the half-wall and finds the man arriving late.

172 tracked attempts, 20 of them slap and 12 deflected. 86.7 mph at the 20th percentile — a soft shot, honestly measured, and it matches everything above.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 193 pounds. 0.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 14th percentile, on 2.54 miles a game at the 46th and a top speed of 22.1 mph at the 43rd.

That is a low-effort tracking line by the league’s standards and it should be read carefully: he plays a slow, possession-heavy game in which the puck moves and he does not have to.

20 penalty minutes in 79 games and 217 in 750 career games. He avoids contact entirely, which at his size is sensible and does cost the club something on the forecheck.

He wins the wall by getting there early rather than by winning it physically, and when he is beaten to the puck he does not get it back.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2010, eleven seasons, 750 games, 484 points across Minnesota, Nashville and Pittsburgh.

The two 67-and-69-point seasons in Minnesota in 2016-17 and 2017-18 are the peak, and the 64 points he recorded in Nashville in 2021-22 on 53 assists says the playmaking has not gone anywhere.

He is thirty-one and joins a fourth club, on a roster with no established scoring winger to feed. That is the whole question in this file: a distributor is worth what the finishers around him are worth, and San Jose does not currently have any.

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.

durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“He is a distributor at 5-10 who plays a possession game from the half-wall and finds the man arriving late.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He wins the wall by getting there early rather than by winning it physically, and when he is beaten to the puck he does not get it back.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,038 minutes

Expected goals: 47.7%; 35th pct
Shot attempts: 48%; 38th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 42 against. Expected: 43.3 and 47.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

62nd

Numbers

35th

The report ranks him 27 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 68 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 · 79 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 50th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.33 a game
Distance: 2.54 miles a game
Hardest shot: 86.7 mph; 46th 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

2022-23 with NSH · 782 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: PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.7% — 5.3 below the club he did it on.
The role: 1,038 minutes at five-on-five — 62nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Roman Josi	43.4%	50.2%	52.2%
Matt Duchene	42.1%	50.1%	51.1%
Filip Forsberg	42.5%	50.3%	59.4%

43.4% together, 50.2% for him apart and 52.2% for Josi apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

171 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 42% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.