Niko Mikkola

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

54 games, 3 goals and 10 assists at 16:59 a night, minus-6, fifty-five penalty minutes, 58 shots. One of the three came short-handed. Hundred-and-twenty-ninth overall in 2015 by St Louis — the fifth round — three seasons, 89 games, 17 points.

The Finesse Game

43.8 per cent of the attempts is the 6th percentile among the 202 defencemen who played forty games, and 47.5 per cent of the expected goals the 31st.

The gap between those two is the file. He is on the wrong end of the shot count badly and much less so on the chance count, which is what a big defenceman clearing the front of the net looks like in the columns.

And the chair is genuinely hard. 31.0 per cent offensive-zone starts is the 24th-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts — 130 shifts starting in the attacking end against 289 in his own.

Twenty-two per cent of his attempts came from inside the slot, the 98th percentile among defencemen, at 6-6 and 204 pounds.

0.46 takeaways per 60 is the 7th percentile. His ice went 37-47 against an expectation of 31.04-34.33 — six more in front and thirteen more against.

The Physical Game

1.70 penalties taken per 60 is the 2nd-most of all 202 defencemen, and the net of minus-1.05 is the 3rd-worst of the 202.

Fifty-five penalty minutes in fifty-four games at seventeen minutes a night. On a club that spent 4:33 a game short-handed, this is the most expensive habit on the roster.

7.13 hits per 60 is the 86th percentile and 5.30 blocks the 81st, so the penalties are the by-product of a game the club otherwise wants.

The Intangibles

His shot is 82.5 mph, the 2nd-softest of the 192 defencemen the tracking measures — twenty miles an hour behind Colton Parayko on the same blue line.

9.09 miles per 60 is the 98th percentile and 3.3 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 the 91st, against a 22.4 mph top speed at the 74th. He covers more ground per minute than almost any defenceman in the league.

He is 26 with eighty-nine NHL games. The chair, the hitting, the blocks, the ground covered and the front of the net are five real things. The third-worst penalty ledger at the position in hockey and the second-softest shot are the two that keep him a third pair, and both are correctable in a way that possession numbers are not.