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

Rasmus Ristolainen

A career minus-176 — the worst figure in this book by thirty-nine — in 682 games.

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

2013-14	BUF	34	2	2	4	-15	6	0	0	0	52	3.9	19:07
2014-15	BUF	78	8	12	20	-32	26	4	0	0	121	6.6	20:37
2015-16	BUF	82	9	32	41	-21	33	4	0	1	202	4.5	25:17
2016-17	BUF	79	6	39	45	-9	58	1	0	2	186	3.2	26:28
2017-18	BUF	73	6	35	41	-25	48	1	0	1	182	3.3	26:30
2018-19	BUF	78	5	38	43	-41	38	1	0	2	182	2.8	24:38
2019-20	BUF	69	6	27	33	-2	46	2	0	0	128	4.7	22:48
2020-21	BUF	49	4	14	18	-18	36	1	0	0	73	5.5	22:17
2021-22	PHI	66	2	14	16	-9	38	0	0	0	97	2.1	21:26
2022-23	PHI	74	3	17	20	-4	32	1	1	0	86	3.5	19:01
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	682	51	230	281	-176	361	15	1	6	1309	3.9	23:07

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

3 goals and 17 assists in 74 games — 20 points — at 19:01 a night. Minus-4, 86 shots at 3.5 per cent, one shorthanded goal, 32 penalty minutes.

48.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 40th percentile, with his ice at 43-49 against an expectation of 41.87-44.21 across 1,167 minutes.

He started 42.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 20th percentile: 287 attacking draws against 386 — the hardest deployment on this blue line, and the 40th-percentile share out of it is a considerably better result than it looks.

Ten seasons, 682 games, 281 points, and a career minus-176 — the worst in this book, and thirty-nine worse than the man behind him.

The Finesse Game

86 shots at a median of 48 feet, and three goals.

Beyond forty feet: 68 shots on goal and 1 goal — 1.47 per cent, less than half the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Inside twenty: seven shots and two goals.

And he is another data point in this edition’s argument about the point shot. 37 of his 121 tracked attempts are slap shots — 31 per cent, a high share — and the long ones went in once. Trouba slaps the same proportion and converts at 1.33; Barrie slaps 45 per cent and converts at 8.11; Braden Schneider slaps 11 per cent and converts at 9.09. Across the league the correlation is r = 0.291 and the quartiles run 2.48 to 4.00 per cent. The shot type is a floor and very little else.

98.3 mph at the 93rd percentile, on that slap count, so the shot is genuinely among the hardest in the league and it has produced 51 goals in ten seasons.

230 career assists against 51 goals. The first pass is the offensive file and it is a real one.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 208, with 32 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.4 mph, the 54th percentile; 0.4 bursts a game, the 19th; 2.49 miles a game, the 41st.

Ordinary top-end speed almost never used, on low mileage for a nineteen-minute defenceman.

He plays the body relentlessly and is very difficult to get around in a confined space. At 6-4 and 208 with a long stick, the front of the net is genuinely his.

What the career record says is that none of that has ever been enough. A minus-176 assembled across Buffalo and Philadelphia is partly two decades of bad clubs and partly a defenceman who has been on the ice for a very large number of goals against.

The Intangibles

Eighth overall in 2013 to Buffalo, eight seasons there, and two here.

A career minus-176 in 682 games. This book has a rule about plus-minus — that it is a poor statistic and a large enough number stops being noise — and 176 across ten seasons is a very large number. Sam Gagner is next at minus-137 in 1,015 games.

He is twenty-eight, and the honest summary is that the deployment he is given is genuinely hard, the chance share out of it is respectable, and no man in this book has been on the ice for a worse balance of goals. All three are true and the file cannot reconcile them.

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.

punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He plays the body relentlessly and is very difficult to get around in a confined space.”
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“At 6-4 and 208 with a long stick, the front of the net is genuinely his.”
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“230 career assists against 51 goals. The first pass is the offensive file and it is a real one.”
defensively-responsiblehe lacks it· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“A minus-176 assembled across Buffalo and Philadelphia is partly two decades of bad clubs and partly a defenceman who has been on the ice for a very large number of goals against.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,167 minutes

Expected goals: 48.6%; 40th pct
Shot attempts: 45.6%; 20th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 43 for, 49 against. Expected: 41.9 and 44.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

43rd

Numbers

40th

The two rank him within 3 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 — 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 · 74 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 80th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.39 a game
Distance: 2.49 miles a game
Hardest shot: 98.3 mph; 90th 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 · 1167 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: PHI took 47.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.6% — 1.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,167 minutes at five-on-five — 80th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Travis Sanheim	46.8%	49.7%	45.3%
Owen Tippett	50.9%	47.5%	48.7%
Kevin Hayes	49.5%	48.3%	48.2%

46.8% together, 49.7% for him apart and 45.3% for Sanheim apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

117 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 6 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 76% from beyond forty.