This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Nick Foligno

Thirty-six years old, 8 power-play goals from the front of the net, and the first shorthanded goal of a seventeen-year career.

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

2007-08	OTT	45	6	3	9	0	20	0	0	0	44	13.6	9:10
2008-09	OTT	81	17	15	32	-10	59	7	0	2	145	11.7	13:41
2009-10	OTT	61	9	17	26	+6	53	2	0	2	83	10.8	14:19
2010-11	OTT	82	14	20	34	-19	43	5	0	3	149	9.4	15:35
2011-12	OTT	82	15	32	47	+2	124	1	0	3	153	9.8	14:39
2012-13	CBJ	45	6	13	19	+6	28	1	0	2	69	8.7	16:31
2013-14	CBJ	70	18	21	39	+5	96	3	0	5	111	16.2	16:04
2014-15	CBJ	79	31	42	73	+16	50	11	0	3	182	17.0	18:50
2015-16	CBJ	72	12	25	37	-14	53	0	0	2	149	8.1	16:54
2016-17	CBJ	79	26	25	51	-4	55	11	0	5	185	14.1	18:26
2017-18	CBJ	72	15	18	33	+1	50	2	0	1	137	10.9	18:21
2018-19	CBJ	73	17	18	35	+12	44	2	0	2	141	12.1	17:42
2019-20	CBJ	67	10	21	31	-3	62	2	0	1	131	7.6	18:40
2020-21	CBJ/TOR	49	7	13	20	+2	32	1	0	0	81	8.6	17:46
2021-22	BOS	64	2	11	13	-13	61	0	0	0	99	2.0	12:28
2022-23	BOS	60	10	16	26	+18	45	2	0	1	71	14.1	12:22
2023-24	CHI	74	17	20	37	-29	57	8	1	0	146	11.6	17:46
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	1155	232	330	562	-24	932	58	1	32	2076	11.2	16:01

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

Seventy-four games at 36, 17 goals and 20 assists, 8 of the goals on the power play and 1 shorthanded — the only shorthanded goal of his 1,155-game career. He played 17:46 a night and finished minus-29.

He took 43.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 998 minutes, the 11th percentile, and his ice went 34-55 against an expectation of 34.28-45.16. Seventeen goals at 36 on the club that scored fewest in the league, most of them from three feet out, is the most useful thing anybody here did.

The Finesse Game

He takes 58 per cent of his attempts from inside 20 feet at a median of 15 — the most net-front profile on the roster — and converted 11.64 per cent of 146 shots. There is nothing about the shot itself: it is a deflection, a rebound and a stick on a loose puck in the blue paint, and he has scored 232 goals in a career doing exactly that.

The hands in tight are better than a man his age has any right to and the passing out of the corner is quick and low.

The Physical Game

He goes to the front of the net first and stays there, and at 6-0 and 210 he is very hard to move once he has set. Nine hundred and thirty-two penalty minutes in 1,155 games is the record of a man who has spent seventeen years in the most crowded three feet on the ice.

He still finishes his checks and he still answers for a teammate. Fifty-seven penalty minutes in 74 games at 36 is not a decline.

The Intangibles

The 28th pick in 2006, a captain in Columbus, and now the senior voice in a room built around a nineteen-year-old. He played the first line all season and took the hardest defensive shifts among the forwards, which at 36 on a club that won twenty-three games is a decision to keep working.

What Chicago is paying for is that a teenager watches a seventeen-year professional prepare for a Tuesday in February, and the eight power-play goals are the bonus.

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.

a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

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.

net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He takes 58 per cent of his attempts from inside 20 feet at a median of 15 — the most net-front profile on the roster — and converted 11.64 per cent of 146 shots.”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He goes to the front of the net first and stays there, and at 6-0 and 210 he is very hard to move once he has set.”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“The 28th pick in 2006, a captain in Columbus, and now the senior voice in a room built around a nineteen-year-old.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He played the first line all season and took the hardest defensive shifts among the forwards, which at 36 on a club that won twenty-three games is a decision to keep working.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 998 minutes

Expected goals: 43.2%; 12th pct
Shot attempts: 43.9%; 12th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 34 for, 55 against. Expected: 34.3 and 45.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

20th

Numbers

12th

The two rank him within 8 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 62 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, 2023-24 · 74 games

Top speed: 21.5 mph; 21st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.38 a game
Distance: 2.60 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.5 mph; 89th 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

2023-24 · 998 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: CHI took 41.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.2% — 1.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 998 minutes at five-on-five — 57th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Philipp Kurashev	40.3%	45.9%	41.6%
Connor Bedard	40.7%	45.1%	41.8%
Kevin Korchinski	44.1%	42.5%	39.4%

40.3% together, 45.9% for him apart and 41.6% for Kurashev apart. He was better away from Kurashev, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Kurashev.

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

183 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 17 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 58% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.