This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Nils Lundkvist

A first-round pick who asked to be traded, and 60 games and sixteen points later he is a third pair.

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

2021-22	NYR	25	1	3	4	+4	0	1	0	0	32	3.1	13:56
2022-23	DAL	60	6	10	16	-5	26	1	0	2	94	6.4	16:19
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	85	7	13	20	-1	26	2	0	2	126	5.6	15:37

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

6 goals and 10 assists in 60 games, minus-5, 16:19 a night — his first real NHL season at 22.

53.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 882 minutes, the 78th percentile — the best figure among Dallas defencemen who played 800 minutes — with his ice at 36-38 against an expectation of 41.43-35.90. Five short at the offensive end and two long at the other, so the results ran behind the chances.

Two seasons, 85 games, 20 points.

The Finesse Game

94 shots at a median of 47 feet, 70 per cent from beyond forty and 5 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty: 64 shots, three goals, 4.69 per cent — above the 3.17 per cent league rate for a defenceman, on real volume. Inside forty: 29 shots, three goals.

Half his goals came from the point, which is unusual and is the argument for the power-play role he has not yet been given.

89.0 mph at the 38th percentile. The shot is below average, and 64 long shots off a below-average shot is a lot of hope.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 194 pounds, and light. 22.6 mph at the 64th percentile, 1.0 bursts a game at the 54th, 2.50 miles a game at the 43rd — ordinary in all three.

26 penalty minutes in 60 games at sixteen minutes a night is a moderate-to-high rate for a defenceman his size, and it fits: he is not winning the physical contests and takes the penalty instead.

The defensive game is the reason he is a third pair rather than a second.

The Intangibles

28th overall in 2018 to the Rangers, three seasons in the Swedish league before he crossed, and a request to be traded after 25 NHL games because the club could not give him a role.

Dallas obliged, gave him 60 games, and the possession numbers came back well. He is 23, on a club with Heiskanen, Lindell, Suter and Hakanpää ahead of him, and the same problem he left New York to escape is waiting.

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.

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-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“he is not winning the physical contests and takes the penalty instead”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 882 minutes

Expected goals: 53.6%; 79th pct
Shot attempts: 51.9%; 70th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 38 against. Expected: 41.4 and 35.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

5th

Numbers

79th

The numbers rank him 74 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 — 53 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 · 60 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 86th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.98 a game
Distance: 2.50 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.0 mph; 34th 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

2022-23 · 882 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: DAL took 52.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.6% — 1.6 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 882 minutes at five-on-five — 47th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Ryan Suter	54.8%	52.4%	51.8%
Jason Robertson	56.6%	52.0%	60.2%
Mason Marchment	54.2%	53.3%	47.7%

54.8% together, 52.4% for him apart and 51.8% for Suter apart. Suter was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Suter 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

128 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 40 feet. 5% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 70% from beyond forty.