Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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.

18

Pierre Engvall

New York Islanders Left Wing

Six foot six, and nine goals of scoring that never arrived on his ice.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2019-20TOR488715+460137211.111:56
2020-21TOR427512+2160016111.511:56
2021-22TOR78152035+13301231549.713:17
2022-23TOR/NYI76171330+83110413113.013:38
2023-24NYI74101828+4182011287.815:20
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—3185763120+31101431254610.413:28

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

74 games, 10 goals and 18 assists for 28 points, 2 on the power play, 18 penalty minutes, 15:20 a night and plus-4. He took 53.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,033 minutes, the 76th percentile, and his ice went 36-33 against an expectation of 44.78-39.49.

Nine goals of scoring that did not arrive — the largest shortfall on the club — and seven fewer conceded than the chances called for. A 76th-percentile chance share that produced twenty-eight points, which is the gap between the play and the finishing.

The Finesse Game

170 attempts at a median of 26 feet with 36 per cent from inside 20, 128 on goal, converted at 7.8 per cent against a career 10.44.

63 career assists in 318 games. He is 6-6 and skates faster than anybody that size has a right to, and the hands do not keep up with the feet. Ten goals on a hundred and twenty-eight shots is three below his own rate.

The Physical Game

He is 6-6 and 208 and does not use any of it.

101 career penalty minutes in 318 games is a very low rate. He does not forecheck by force, does not clear a crease, and does not win many walls, which at that size is the whole frustration.

The Intangibles

A seventh-round pick in 2014 out of Ljungby, five seasons across two organisations, and 120 points in 318 games.

He is 28 and has 3 career shorthanded goals from a penalty kill he is genuinely good on. The chance share says the line works; the finishing says he is not the reason.

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
  • 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.

  • punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally

    “He is 6-6 and 208 and does not use any of it.”

  • forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck

    “He does not forecheck by force, does not clear a crease, and does not win many walls, which at that size is the whole frustration.”

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

    “He does not forecheck by force, does not clear a crease, and does not win many walls, which at that size is the whole frustration.”

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

    “He does not forecheck by force, does not clear a crease, and does not win many walls, which at that size is the whole frustration.”

  • penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short

    “He is 28 and has 3 career shorthanded goals from a penalty kill he is genuinely good on.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 1,033 minutes

Expected goals
53.1%
77th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
50.9%
62nd pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 33 against. Expected: 44.8 and 39.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
27th
Numbers
77th

The numbers rank him 50 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 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 · 74 games

Top speed
22.7 mph
75th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.1

Bursts over 20 mph
3.41 a game

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

Distance
2.57 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
97.3 mph
97th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 84.5

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 · 1033 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
NYI took 49.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.1% — 4.0 above the club he did it on.
The role
Second line, 1,033 minutes at five-on-five — 63rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Brock Nelson52.7%54.2%45.1%
Kyle Palmieri52.7%54.0%48.9%
Alexander Romanov52.0%53.8%47.5%

52.7% together, 54.2% for him apart and 45.1% for Nelson apart. Nelson was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Nelson 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

170 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 36% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 27% from beyond forty.