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

Ondrej Palat

A seventh-round pick with a career plus-152, in the fewest games of any full season he has played.

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

2012-13	TBL	14	2	2	4	+5	0	0	0	1	16	12.5	11:44
2013-14	TBL	81	23	36	59	+32	20	3	2	3	165	13.9	18:02
2014-15	TBL	75	16	47	63	+31	24	3	1	5	139	11.5	17:26
2015-16	TBL	62	16	24	40	+10	20	1	2	4	117	13.7	17:55
2016-17	TBL	75	17	35	52	+8	39	5	0	3	162	10.5	19:07
2017-18	TBL	56	11	24	35	+16	6	4	1	0	109	10.1	17:00
2018-19	TBL	64	8	26	34	+4	20	2	0	1	100	8.0	14:53
2019-20	TBL	69	17	24	41	+25	22	4	1	2	128	13.3	16:11
2020-21	TBL	55	15	31	46	+1	26	7	0	6	111	13.5	17:27
2021-22	TBL	77	18	31	49	+15	20	1	0	5	143	12.6	16:30
2022-23	NJD	49	8	15	23	+5	6	1	0	1	79	10.1	15:32
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	677	151	295	446	+152	203	31	7	31	1269	11.9	16:58

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

8 goals and 15 assists in 49 games — 23 points — at 15:32 a night. Plus-5, 79 shots at 10.1 per cent, six penalty minutes.

Forty-nine games in an eighty-two-game season, the fewest he has played in any year but his fourteen-game debut.

59.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 97th percentile and the second-highest on the club, with his ice at 31-25 against an expectation of 34.86-24.07 across 667 minutes.

He started 53.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 65th percentile.

Eleven seasons, 677 games, 446 points, and a career plus-152.

The Finesse Game

79 shots at a median of 26 feet, 40 per cent of them from inside twenty.

Inside twenty: 34 shots on goal and 6 goals, 17.65 per cent, which is the league forward rate to within a hundredth. From twenty to forty: 31 shots and 2 goals.

A league-average finisher on a quarter of the volume of a first-line winger, which is the correct description of what he is now.

42 wrist shots and 22 snap out of 110 tracked attempts. 91.2 mph at the 53rd percentile.

295 career assists against 151 goals. He plays the give-and-go off the wall and arrives late into the slot, and the reason his chance shares are always near the top of the league is that he does not leave the zone until the puck does.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 194, with six penalty minutes in forty-nine games.

Top speed 22.1 mph, the 40th percentile; 0.5 bursts a game, the 24th; 2.50 miles a game, the 43rd.

Below the league in all three, at thirty-two, and it has never been the point. The whole file is anticipation, and anticipation does not appear in any measurement this book has.

He goes to the hard areas, protects the puck below the goal line and does not get knocked off it. That is the part of the game that carried a seventh-round pick through eleven seasons of top-six minutes.

The Intangibles

Two hundred and eighth overall in 2011, the second-to-last round, and ten seasons in Tampa before this one.

The career plus-152 is the number to sit with. Plus-minus is a poor statistic and one hundred and fifty-two of it across 677 games is not noise; it is a decade of being on the ice when the puck went the right way.

He is thirty-two, on a five-year contract, and the forty-nine games are the risk the club has already bought. The chance shares say that when he plays, the ice tilts.

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.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
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.

disciplined· stays out of the box
0.12 penalty minutes a game over 49, 8th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He goes to the hard areas, protects the puck below the goal line and does not get knocked off it.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“He plays the give-and-go off the wall and arrives late into the slot, and the reason his chance shares are always near the top of the league is that he does not leave the zone until the puck does.”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“That is the part of the game that carried a seventh-round pick through eleven seasons of top-six minutes.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 667 minutes

Expected goals: 59.2%; 97th pct
Shot attempts: 54.1%; 86th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 31 for, 25 against. Expected: 34.9 and 24.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

74th

Numbers

97th

The numbers rank him 23 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 — 71 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 · 49 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 48th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.49 a game
Distance: 2.50 miles a game
Hardest shot: 91.2 mph; 74th 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 · 667 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: NJD took 56.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 59.2% — 3.1 above the club he did it on.
The role: 667 minutes at five-on-five — 28th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jesper Bratt	57.8%	61.1%	58.9%
Dougie Hamilton	60.5%	58.3%	54.9%
Damon Severson	57.1%	60.6%	60.3%

57.8% together, 61.1% for him apart and 58.9% for Bratt apart. He was better away from Bratt, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Bratt.

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

109 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 8 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 40% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.