This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Nils Hoglander
Vancouver Canucks Left Wing
Five foot nine, twenty-five games, and a season spent in the minors.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | VAN | 56 | 13 | 14 | 27 | -4 | 16 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 118 | 11.0 | 15:27 |
| 2021-22 | VAN | 60 | 10 | 8 | 18 | -6 | 24 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 132 | 7.6 | 13:05 |
| 2022-23 | VAN | 25 | 3 | 6 | 9 | -4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 29 | 10.3 | 12:03 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 141 | 26 | 28 | 54 | -14 | 46 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 279 | 9.3 | 13:50 |
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 6 assists in 25 games — 9 points — at 12:03 a night. Minus-4, 29 shots at 10.3 per cent, 6 penalty minutes.
Twenty-five games, in his third season, after 56 and 60. He was not in the NHL for the other fifty-seven.
44.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 293 minutes, the 12th percentile, with his ice at 13-16 against an expectation of 10.49-13.22.
He started 52.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 60th percentile.
Two hundred and ninety-three minutes is a fifth of a season. Nothing in the row above is worth much.
The Finesse Game
29 shots at a median of 29 feet.
Inside twenty feet: seven shots on goal and two goals. From twenty to forty: 13 shots and one goal. Beyond forty: five shots and none. Twenty-five shots on goal, and this book will read nothing from them.
40 tracked attempts, 24 of them wrist shots and three slap. 87.1 mph at the 23rd percentile — a soft shot from a small man.
26 goals in 141 career games at 9.3 per cent, with 13 of them in a 56-game rookie season that remains the best hockey he has played.
He is a puck-possession winger who takes it into traffic and comes out with it, and the reason the rookie season worked was that he did that against defencemen who had not seen him before.
The Physical Game
5-9 and 185 pounds, with 6 penalty minutes in 25 games and 46 in 141 career games.
Top speed 22.2 mph at the 47th percentile, 1.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 70th, and 1.96 miles a game at the 15th — twelve minutes of ice time.
Quick rather than fast, which at 5-9 is what the game requires of him.
He plays much heavier than 185 pounds and goes into the corners against men who outweigh him by thirty, and the willingness is the reason a 5-9 winger was drafted in the second round at all.
He wins pucks along the wall by getting low, which is a real skill and the thing his junior scouting reports were built on.
The Intangibles
Fortieth overall in 2019, the second round, three seasons, 141 games, 54 points, all of them here.
26 goals and 28 assists, and a minus-14.
He is twenty-two, and the three seasons read 27 points in 56 games, 18 in 60, and 9 in 25.
A trajectory that goes 27, 18, 9 is not a slump, it is a club making a decision. What the file has left is a twenty-two-year-old second-round pick with a good rookie season, real puck skill in traffic, and one more chance at it.
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.
“He wins pucks along the wall by getting low, which is a real skill and the thing his junior scouting reports were built on.”
“He plays much heavier than 185 pounds and goes into the corners against men who outweigh him by thirty, and the willingness is the reason a 5-9 winger was drafted in the second round at all.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 293 minutes
- Expected goals
- 44.2%
- 16th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.1%
- 39th 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: 13 for, 16 against. Expected: 10.5 and 13.2.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 50 points above where the numbers do. 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 — 69 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 · 25 games
- Top speed
- 22.2 mph
- 53rd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.40 a game
- Distance
- 1.96 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.1 mph
- 49th 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 · 293 minutes at five-on-five
- J.T. Miller37%
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
- VAN took 47.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.2% — 2.8 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 293 minutes at five-on-five — 5th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bo Horvat | 44.8% | 43.9% | 49.1% |
| J.T. Miller | 46.6% | 42.8% | 47.4% |
| Oliver Ekman-Larsson | 39.7% | 46.7% | 45.7% |
44.8% together, 43.9% for him apart and 49.1% for Horvat apart. Horvat was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more 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
36 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 7 feet. 31% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.