Nathan Beaulieu
Anaheim Ducks Defense
Four hundred and nineteen games, 301 penalty minutes, and a 36.8 per cent chance share over 216 minutes — the lowest on the roster by a distance.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-13 | MTL | 6 | 0 | 2 | 2 | +5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0.0 | 15:22 |
| 2013-14 | MTL | 17 | 0 | 2 | 2 | +6 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 15 | 0.0 | 13:14 |
| 2014-15 | MTL | 64 | 1 | 8 | 9 | +6 | 45 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 62 | 1.6 | 15:42 |
| 2015-16 | MTL | 64 | 2 | 17 | 19 | -6 | 55 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 74 | 2.7 | 17:27 |
| 2016-17 | MTL | 74 | 4 | 24 | 28 | +8 | 44 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 118 | 3.4 | 19:29 |
| 2017-18 | BUF | 59 | 1 | 8 | 9 | -19 | 36 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 67 | 1.5 | 15:57 |
| 2018-19 | BUF/WPG | 48 | 3 | 9 | 12 | +6 | 39 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 60 | 5.0 | 15:30 |
| 2019-20 | WPG | 38 | 1 | 7 | 8 | +15 | 29 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 38 | 2.6 | 17:00 |
| 2020-21 | WPG | 25 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -5 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 26 | 0.0 | 16:44 |
| 2021-22 | WPG | 24 | 0 | 4 | 4 | -7 | 25 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 24 | 0.0 | 10:46 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 419 | 12 | 82 | 94 | +9 | 301 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 492 | 2.4 | 16:26 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
With Winnipeg. 0 goals and 4 assists in 24 games — 4 points at 10:46 a night, minus-7, on 24 shots and 25 penalty minutes.
36.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 216 minutes. His ice went 5-12 against an expectation of 5.94-10.22.
Two hundred and sixteen minutes is not enough to convict anybody, and it is also the entire measured record of his season. What can be said is that a 29-year-old playing under eleven minutes on a club that missed the playoffs, at the lowest chance share of anybody Anaheim will dress, is not a man his last team was fighting to keep.
The Finesse Game
24 attempts at a median of 55 feet, 79 per cent of them from beyond 40 feet, no goals. 12 goals and 94 points in 419 career games.
He was a puck-mover when Montreal drafted him and there is still a first pass in there. It has been eight years since anybody built a pairing around it.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 200. 301 penalty minutes in 419 games is a physical record without a punishing one behind it — he is chippy rather than heavy, and a good deal of that total is retaliation.
The tracking is thin on 24 games and reads slow throughout. He is not quick, he does not cover ground, and at 30 there is no reason to expect either to change.
The Intangibles
Seventeenth overall in 2011 by Montreal, and a career that has taken in five seasons in Montreal, two in Buffalo, four in Winnipeg and a good deal of pressbox.
He is 29, on a roster that has just lost both of its top-four defencemen and has room it did not have a year ago. He is depth, he knows he is depth, and the useful thing he offers a club playing a twenty-year-old twenty minutes a night is that he has seen 419 games of it and will not be surprised by anything.
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.
- ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
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.
“301 penalty minutes in 419 games is a physical record without a punishing one behind it”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 216 minutes
- Expected goals
- 36.8%
- 1st pct
- Shot attempts
- 40.7%
- 2nd 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: 5 for, 12 against. Expected: 5.9 and 10.2.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 3 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 47 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, 2021-22 · 24 games
- Top speed
- 20.4 mph
- 15th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.21 a game
- Distance
- 1.36 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 90.5 mph
- 39th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.4
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
2021-22 with WPG · 216 minutes at five-on-five
- Dylan DeMelo32%
- Nate Schmidt27%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- WPG took 50.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 36.8% — 13.3 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 216 minutes at five-on-five — 2nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pierre-Luc Dubois | 40.6% | 34.8% | 53.5% |
| Kyle Connor | 43.2% | 33.1% | 50.0% |
| Dylan DeMelo | 44.8% | 33.5% | 54.8% |
40.6% together, 34.8% for him apart and 53.5% for Dubois apart. He was the one being carried: the share went with Dubois and did not follow 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
38 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 0 of them goals. 11% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 79% from beyond forty.