This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Nic Dowd
Washington Capitals Center
Seventy-four attacking draws against three hundred and seventy-seven defensive ones — the second-hardest deployment in this book.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | LAK | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0.0 | 10:35 |
| 2016-17 | LAK | 70 | 6 | 16 | 22 | -15 | 25 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 78 | 7.7 | 12:27 |
| 2017-18 | LAK/VAN | 56 | 3 | 1 | 4 | -10 | 28 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 51 | 5.9 | 10:32 |
| 2018-19 | WSH | 64 | 8 | 14 | 22 | +10 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 47 | 17.0 | 10:18 |
| 2019-20 | WSH | 56 | 7 | 8 | 15 | +11 | 28 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 52 | 13.5 | 10:50 |
| 2020-21 | WSH | 56 | 11 | 4 | 15 | +4 | 31 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 68 | 16.2 | 14:22 |
| 2021-22 | WSH | 64 | 10 | 14 | 24 | +10 | 44 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 90 | 11.1 | 14:16 |
| 2022-23 | WSH | 65 | 13 | 12 | 25 | +6 | 26 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 62 | 21.0 | 13:21 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 436 | 58 | 69 | 127 | +17 | 204 | 2 | 4 | 13 | 451 | 12.9 | 12:18 |
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
13 goals and 12 assists in 65 games — 25 points — at 13:21 a night. Plus-6, 62 shots at 21.0 per cent, three game-winners, 26 penalty minutes.
He started 16.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone — the 0th percentile, and the second-lowest of the 525 skaters in this book’s pool: 74 attacking draws against 377 defensive ones.
Seventy-four. Across an entire season, on a club that used him for thirteen minutes a night, he was sent out for an offensive-zone faceoff seventy-four times.
51.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 706 minutes, the 56th percentile, with his ice at 31-27 against an expectation of 28.27-26.77.
An above-average chance share out of the very bottom of the deployment scale is the single most impressive line in this chapter, and 25 points is all the newspaper recorded.
The Finesse Game
62 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 52 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 10 per cent from beyond forty.
Inside twenty feet: 31 shots on goal and 10 goals — 32.26 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 22 shots and three goals, 13.64 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: eight shots and none.
Ten goals from thirty-one slot shots is nearly twice the league rate and it is thirty-one shots — a career 12.9 per cent across 436 games says the 21.0 will come most of the way back.
84 tracked attempts in 65 games, 30 of them wrist shots and 11 tip-ins. His shot is measured at 95.6 mph, the 81st percentile, which is a genuine surprise from a fourth-line centre who takes one shot a game.
58 goals in 436 career games. The scoring is incidental and thirteen of it last season was a very good year.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 195 pounds, with 26 penalty minutes in 65 games and 204 in 436 career games.
Top speed 21.8 mph at the 25th percentile, 0.8 bursts above twenty a game at the 42nd, 2.18 miles a game at the 23rd. Slow, and covering little ground on thirteen minutes.
So the deployment is not being carried by his feet. It is being carried by where he stands.
He kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw, which the zone-start column makes visible even though this book cannot see who wins a faceoff — and at 74 against 377, the coach’s opinion of him is not in any doubt.
He is defensively responsible in the fullest sense of the phrase: a centre put on the ice specifically because the puck is in the wrong place, whose club’s chances get better rather than worse while he is out there.
He is not punishing and the 204 career penalty minutes are stick fouls at the end of long shifts.
The Intangibles
A hundred and ninety-eighth overall in 2009, the seventh round, eight seasons, 436 games, 127 points across Los Angeles, Vancouver and Washington.
58 goals and 69 assists, and a plus-17.
He is thirty-three, from Alabama, and he was drafted in the seventh round and did not reach the league until he was twenty-five.
A seventh-round pick who plays four hundred NHL games taking the hardest starts on his club is exactly the kind of career this book exists to record, and the zone-start column is the only place in the whole of hockey’s public statistics where it shows up.
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.
- hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
16% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 0th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
“He kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw, which the zone-start column makes visible even though this book cannot see who wins a faceoff — and at 74 against 377, the coach's opinion of him is not in any doubt.”
“He is defensively responsible in the fullest sense of the phrase: a centre put on the ice specifically because the puck is in the wrong place, whose club's chances get better rather than worse while he is out there.”
“He is not punishing and the 204 career penalty minutes are stick fouls at the end of long shifts.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 706 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.4%
- 62nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 50.2%
- 55th 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: 31 for, 27 against. Expected: 28.3 and 26.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 16 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 72 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 · 65 games
- Top speed
- 21.8 mph
- 35th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.77 a game
- Distance
- 2.18 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 95.6 mph
- 94th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 · 706 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
- WSH took 49.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.4% — 2.1 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 706 minutes at five-on-five — 31st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garnet Hathaway | 54.8% | 47.5% | 46.8% |
| Nick Jensen | 49.0% | 53.2% | 50.3% |
| Aliaksei Protas | 56.5% | 48.1% | 50.7% |
54.8% together, 47.5% for him apart and 46.8% for Hathaway 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
82 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 13 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 54% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 15% from beyond forty.