Armchair Hockey Scout

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2024-25 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

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98

Pavel Mintyukov

Anaheim Ducks Defense

Twenty-four assists from the blue line at twenty, on ice for fifty goals against.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2023-24ANA6342428-2024000884.518:51
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—6342428-2024000884.518:51

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

4 goals and 24 assists in 63 games — 28 points at 18:51 a night, minus-20, on 88 shots with 24 penalty minutes. It was his first NHL season and he was twenty.

46.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 962 minutes, the 27th percentile. His ice went 29-51 against an expectation of 37.51-43.59 — ten goals of scoring missing and seven conceded above expectation, the worst pair of numbers on the roster in both directions at once.

The Finesse Game

88 attempts at a median of 41 feet, with 52 per cent from beyond 40 and 16 per cent from inside 20, converting at 4.6 per cent.

Twenty-four assists as a twenty-year-old defenceman is the number that matters here. He carries the puck out of his own zone rather than chipping it out, he gains the line under control, and he will attempt the seam pass from the point that a safer player does not. The skating is good enough to make the carry the default and it is why he plays nineteen minutes.

Some of the twenty-four are the consequence of playing on a club that spent the year defending.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 207 and the strength has not arrived. He does not clear the front of his own net against a grown forward and he loses more battles below the goal line than he wins.

24 penalty minutes in 63 games is a clean rate. He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the fouls he does take are the stick foul that follows losing a step.

The Intangibles

Tenth overall in 2022 and an NHL regular at twenty, on a club with nowhere better to play him.

Twenty-seven goals for and fifty against on his ice is a brutal way to learn, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not say. A twenty-year-old defenceman playing nineteen minutes on the thirtieth-place team is going to be underwater and the number is close to meaningless as a verdict on him. The twenty-four assists are not.

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
  • 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.

  • slot-man· shoots from where goals are scored

    19.8% of his attempts in the slot, 96th percentile among defencemen

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.69) · 44% keep it

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “**He carries the puck out of his own zone rather than chipping it out**, he gains the line under control, and he will attempt the seam pass from the point that a safer player does not.”

  • playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “**Twenty-four assists as a twenty-year-old defenceman is the number that matters here.**”

  • clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net

    “**He does not clear the front of his own net against a grown forward** and he loses more battles below the goal line than he wins.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “**He does not clear the front of his own net against a grown forward** and he loses more battles below the goal line than he wins.”

  • fouls-when-beatena strength· the stick foul that follows losing a step

    “He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the fouls he does take are the stick foul that follows losing a step.”

  • agitatorhe lacks it· gets under the skin; draws the retaliation

    “He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the fouls he does take are the stick foul that follows losing a step.”

  • retaliateshe lacks it· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty

    “He does not retaliate and he is not an agitator, and the fouls he does take are the stick foul that follows losing a step.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 962 minutes

Expected goals
46.3%
28th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
46.3%
24th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 29 for, 51 against. Expected: 37.5 and 43.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
27th
Numbers
28th

The two rank him within 1 points of one another. 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.

Both bars are percentiles among the 652 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, 2023-24 · 63 games

Top speed
21.9 mph
60th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.7

Bursts over 20 mph
0.57 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.66 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
80.7 mph
10th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 90.2

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

2023-24 · 962 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, 2023-24

The club
ANA took 45.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.3% — 0.4 above the club he did it on.
The role
Third pair, 962 minutes at five-on-five — 53rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Ilya Lyubushkin45.2%47.5%49.2%
Troy Terry45.4%46.6%47.9%
Frank Vatrano51.4%44.1%41.3%

45.2% together, 47.5% for him apart and 49.2% for Lyubushkin apart. Lyubushkin 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

111 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 31 feet. 16% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 52% from beyond forty.