Nikita Alexandrov
St. Louis Blues Center
Twenty-eight games at nine minutes, and the second percentile of shot speed.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-23 | STL | 28 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 28 | 10.7 | 9:49 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 28 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 28 | 10.7 | 9:49 |
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
3 goals and 4 assists in 28 games — 7 points — at 9:49 a night. Even, 28 shots at 10.7 per cent, 8 penalty minutes.
It was his first NHL season.
50.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 267 minutes, the 46th percentile — the best of any St. Louis forward — with his ice at 8-8 against an expectation of 9.88-9.84.
He started 65.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 98th percentile: 75 attacking draws against 40 defensive ones. That is the softest deployment on this roster and the correct one for a twenty-two-year-old centre playing nine minutes.
Two hundred and sixty-seven minutes. Nothing here is a finding.
The Finesse Game
28 shots at a median of 17 feet, with 50 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.
Inside twenty feet: 19 shots on goal and three goals — 15.79 per cent. From twenty to forty: five shots and none. Beyond forty: two shots and none.
A seventeen-foot median from a rookie centre is the encouraging part of a very small file: he goes to the right place, and nineteen of his twenty-six shots on goal came from inside twenty feet.
40 tracked attempts, none of them slap shots, seven tip-ins and six backhands.
80.4 mph at the 2nd percentile — one of the softest measured shots in this book, and the single clearest limitation in the file. A centre who gets to seventeen feet and cannot beat a goaltender from there is a passer, and the four assists say the same thing.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 189 pounds. 1.65 miles a game at the 3rd percentile on under ten minutes a night, with a top speed of 22.6 mph at the 70th and 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 61st.
The mileage is ice time. The speed measures are above average and are the more useful half of the tracking line.
8 penalty minutes in 28 games. He is not a physical player and at 189 pounds he is moved off the puck by NHL defencemen.
What he does is find the soft ice and arrive there before the puck does, which is a centre’s skill and is why the 98th-percentile deployment produced a positive chance share.
The Intangibles
Sixty-second overall in 2019, the second round, one season, 28 games, 7 points.
Born in Burgwedel, Germany, and the only player in this book born there.
He is twenty-two, on a club with three top-six jobs newly vacant and minutes to give. The 46th-percentile chance share out of the softest starts on the roster is a fair beginning and the shot speed is the obvious thing to improve.
Everything else waits for a second season.
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
- 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.
“What he does is find the soft ice and arrive there before the puck does, which is a centre's skill and is why the 98th-percentile deployment produced a positive chance share.”
“He is not a physical player and at 189 pounds he is moved off the puck by NHL defencemen.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 267 minutes
- Expected goals
- 50.1%
- 54th pct
- Shot attempts
- 45.7%
- 20th 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: 8 for, 8 against. Expected: 9.9 and 9.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 25 points above where the report does. 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 — 61 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 · 28 games
- Top speed
- 22.6 mph
- 75th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.14 a game
- Distance
- 1.65 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 80.4 mph
- 19th 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 · 267 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
- STL took 45.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.1% — 4.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 267 minutes at five-on-five — 4th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tyler Pitlick | 49.7% | 50.8% | 43.0% |
| Alexey Toropchenko | 48.1% | 52.1% | 44.5% |
| Justin Faulk | 40.5% | 55.4% | 43.9% |
49.7% together, 50.8% for him apart and 43.0% for Pitlick apart. Pitlick was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Pitlick than for 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 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 7 feet. 58% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.