Armchair Hockey Scout Beta

This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

11

Nathan Bastian

New Jersey Devils Right Wing

Six foot four, a shot median of sixteen feet, and ten minutes a night.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2018-19NJD73030100001323.112:41
2020-21NJD413710021000466.512:37
2021-22SEA/NJD7212618-12653019712.411:54
2022-23NJD436915+731001629.712:26
2023-24NJD545712-1032001578.810:10
2024-25 so far
Career217292958-1515930327510.511:44

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

54 games, 5 goals and 7 assists for 12 points, 32 penalty minutes, 10:10 a night and minus-10. He took 46.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 479 minutes, the 27th percentile, and his ice went 15-25 against an expectation of 17.04-19.76.

Two goals of scoring that did not arrive and five more conceded than the chances called for. A minus-10 in ten minutes a night on the fourth line, most of it the crease.

The Finesse Game

57 shots at a median of 16 feet with 60 per cent from inside 20, converted at 8.8 per cent against a career 10.55.

29 career assists in 217 games. He shoots from closer in than almost anybody on this roster and he takes very few of them. Fifty-eight points in two hundred and seventeen games is the whole offensive record.

The Physical Game

He hits hard at 6-4 and 217 and finishes every check.

159 career penalty minutes in 217 games is a real rate. He forechecks aggressively, wins the wall, clears the crease, and will fight.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2016 out of Kitchener, five seasons, and 58 points in 217 games, all of it for one organisation.

He is 26 and has been a fourth-line winger for five years. The summer brought Noesen, Tatar, Cotter and MacDermid, and there are not four fourth-line jobs.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 479 minutes

Expected goals
46.3%
28th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
50.5%
59th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 15 for, 25 against. Expected: 17.0 and 19.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
37th
Numbers
28th

The two rank him within 9 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 415 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 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.

Usual linemates

2023-24 · 479 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, 2023-24

The club
NJD took 50.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.3% — 4.4 below the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 479 minutes at five-on-five — 16th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Curtis Lazar52.3%42.1%48.4%
John Marino45.5%46.8%50.0%
Luke Hughes49.9%44.4%52.2%

52.3% together, 42.1% for him apart and 48.4% for Lazar 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

80 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 60% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.