Oskar Lindblom

Six goals in seventy-three games, all but none of them from inside twenty feet, at 1.65 miles a night.

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

2017-18	PHI	23	2	4	6	+4	8	0	0	1	36	5.6	14:35
2018-19	PHI	81	17	16	33	-9	20	2	0	2	162	10.5	13:45
2019-20	PHI	30	11	7	18	+4	4	3	0	0	72	15.3	17:37
2020-21	PHI	50	8	6	14	-9	9	0	0	1	58	13.8	13:11
2021-22	PHI	79	12	14	26	-11	22	0	0	1	127	9.4	13:48
2022-23	SJS	73	6	9	15	-16	18	0	0	0	75	8.0	10:34
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	336	56	56	112	-37	81	5	0	5	530	10.6	13:23

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 9 assists in 73 games — 15 points — at 10:34 a night. Minus-16, 75 shots at 8.0 per cent, 18 penalty minutes, no power-play points.

10:34 a night is the lowest of his six seasons by two and a half minutes.

44.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 14th percentile, across 695 minutes, with his ice at 23-39 against an expectation of 23.37-28.76 — ten goals worse at the defensive end than the chances called for.

He started 43.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 21st percentile.

The Finesse Game

75 shots at a median of 23 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 29 shots on goal and six goals — 20.69 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 26 shots and none. Beyond forty: 17 shots and none.

Every goal he scored came from inside twenty feet, and forty-three shots on goal from outside it produced nothing. On a fourth line at ten minutes a night, that is a functional distribution rather than a failure: he goes to the net and scores from there or not at all.

100 tracked attempts, 21 of them tip-ins — a 21 per cent share, and only two slap shots.

88.7 mph at the 35th percentile. Six goals on 75 shots is an 8.0 per cent rate against a career 10.6.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 191 pounds. 1.65 miles a game, the 2nd percentile of the league, with 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 17th and a top speed of 21.9 mph at the 31st.

At 10:34 a night the mileage is mostly ice time, and the burst count is not: he sprints less often than four skaters in five while he is out there. This is a slow fourth-line winger and the tracking says so from two directions at once.

18 penalty minutes in 73 games and 81 in 336 career games — one of the cleanest records in this chapter.

He works the net front and takes what comes there, which is where the tip-in count and the goals both come from.

The Intangibles

A hundred and thirty-eighth overall in 2014, the fifth round, six seasons, 336 games, 112 points across Philadelphia and San Jose.

The 2019-20 season ended at thirty games when he was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, and he returned to play the following year. That is the fact this file exists around and it is the one thing about him most readers already know.

What the numbers say is narrower: 56 goals in 336 games, a 17-goal season in 2018-19, and a role that has shrunk from 13:45 to 10:34 across two clubs.

He is twenty-seven, on a rebuilding club, playing the fourth line. The 14th-percentile chance share is the number that will decide whether he keeps the job.

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.

net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He works the net front and takes what comes there, which is where the tip-in count and the goals both come from.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 695 minutes

Expected goals: 44.8%; 19th pct
Shot attempts: 45.4%; 19th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 23 for, 39 against. Expected: 23.4 and 28.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

43rd

Numbers

19th

The report ranks him 24 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 — 64 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 · 73 games

Top speed: 21.9 mph; 40th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.37 a game
Distance: 1.65 miles a game
Hardest shot: 88.7 mph; 60th 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 · 695 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: SJS took 48.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.8% — 3.7 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 695 minutes at five-on-five — 31st percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Steven Lorentz	45.0%	44.4%	48.6%
Mario Ferraro	38.6%	48.0%	46.8%
Matt Benning	46.8%	43.8%	45.7%

45.0% together, 44.4% for him apart and 48.6% for Lorentz apart. Lorentz 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

97 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 36% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.