This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Phillip Danault
Los Angeles Kings Center
The 85th percentile in chance share, the 33rd in zone starts, and a minus-8 that belongs to the percentages.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | CHI | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 9:30 |
| 2015-16 | CHI/MTL | 51 | 4 | 6 | 10 | -5 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 72 | 5.6 | 12:46 |
| 2016-17 | MTL | 82 | 13 | 27 | 40 | +5 | 35 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 133 | 9.8 | 15:35 |
| 2017-18 | MTL | 52 | 8 | 17 | 25 | 0 | 34 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 94 | 8.5 | 16:35 |
| 2018-19 | MTL | 81 | 12 | 41 | 53 | +17 | 39 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 132 | 9.1 | 17:47 |
| 2019-20 | MTL | 71 | 13 | 34 | 47 | +18 | 32 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 131 | 9.9 | 18:51 |
| 2020-21 | MTL | 53 | 5 | 19 | 24 | +9 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 73 | 6.9 | 16:52 |
| 2021-22 | LAK | 79 | 27 | 24 | 51 | +14 | 38 | 2 | 0 | 5 | 194 | 13.9 | 18:08 |
| 2022-23 | LAK | 82 | 18 | 36 | 54 | -8 | 63 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 152 | 11.8 | 18:20 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 553 | 100 | 204 | 304 | +50 | 279 | 6 | 1 | 14 | 983 | 10.2 | 17:02 |
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
18 goals and 36 assists in all 82 games — 54 points. Minus-8, 18:20 a night, 152 shots at 11.8 per cent, 63 penalty minutes.
The minus-8 is the number to take apart. His ice took 54.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 85th percentile, and finished 39-45 against an expectation of 50.08-41.27. Eleven goals short at the offensive end, four long at the defensive one.
And it happened while starting 47.0 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 33rd percentile. He controlled the play from the harder side of even and the puck went in at the wrong end.
Nine seasons, 553 games, 304 points.
The Finesse Game
152 shots at a median of 23 feet, 45 per cent from inside twenty and 19 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 27 shots on goal, 1 goal. Inside forty: 119 shots, 17 goals, 14.29 per cent.
Fifty-one points in his first Los Angeles season and fifty-four in his second, from a man whose Montreal career high was thirteen goals. The finishing arrived at twenty-eight.
90.4 mph at the 46th percentile, on ten slap shots. The mix is unusually varied — 26 snap, 19 backhand, 10 tip-in, 5 poke — which is the shot chart of a centre who scores from scrambles.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 200, and 63 penalty minutes.
Top speed 22.2 mph, the 46th percentile; bursts 0.6 a game, the 28th; 2.86 miles a game, the 71st. The ordinary reading of a matchup centre: a great deal of ground, none of it covered quickly.
He wins faceoffs, kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw against the other club’s best line. The 63 penalty minutes are the cost of doing that job at 22.2 mph — most of them are stick infractions in his own end.
The Intangibles
Twenty-sixth overall in 2011 to Chicago, six Montreal seasons in which he was the club’s defensive centre, and two Los Angeles seasons in which he has scored more than he ever did there.
Los Angeles allowed the second-fewest expected goals per sixty at even strength in the league. He and Kopitar are the two men that fact runs through.
The minus-8 will be quoted against him and it should not be. Nothing in the underlying record says he had a bad season; it says the goaltending behind him gave back nine and a half goals of value, which was twenty-third in the league.
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.
- durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“He wins faceoffs, kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw against the other club's best line.”
“He wins faceoffs, kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw against the other club's best line.”
“He controlled the play from the harder side of even and the puck went in at the wrong end.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,143 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.8%
- 86th pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.9%
- 79th 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: 39 for, 45 against. Expected: 50.1 and 41.3.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 2 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 76 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 · 82 games
- Top speed
- 22.2 mph
- 53rd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.57 a game
- Distance
- 2.86 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 90.4 mph
- 69th 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 · 1143 minutes at five-on-five
- Trevor Moore60%
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
- LAK took 53.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.8% — 1.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First line, 1,143 minutes at five-on-five — 78th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Viktor Arvidsson | 55.9% | 48.6% | 51.9% |
| Trevor Moore | 56.0% | 53.1% | 44.9% |
| Drew Doughty | 51.0% | 57.4% | 54.5% |
55.9% together, 48.6% for him apart and 51.9% for Arvidsson apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
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
197 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 18 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.