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

Rickard Rakell

Twenty-eight goals at a twenty-one-foot median, and eleven of them on the power play.

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

2012-13	ANA	4	0	0	0	-2	0	0	0	0	3	0.0	8:57
2013-14	ANA	18	0	4	4	-3	2	0	0	0	22	0.0	11:43
2014-15	ANA	71	9	22	31	+6	10	2	0	1	105	8.6	12:34
2015-16	ANA	72	20	23	43	-1	19	4	0	7	169	11.8	16:04
2016-17	ANA	71	33	18	51	+10	12	5	0	10	177	18.6	17:23
2017-18	ANA	77	34	35	69	+6	14	8	0	3	230	14.8	19:25
2018-19	ANA	69	18	25	43	-13	27	6	0	2	194	9.3	18:28
2019-20	ANA	65	15	27	42	-5	12	3	0	2	186	8.1	18:10
2020-21	ANA	52	9	19	28	-14	12	0	0	1	144	6.3	17:50
2021-22	ANA/PIT	70	20	21	41	0	12	5	0	2	184	10.9	17:59
2022-23	PIT	82	28	32	60	-5	16	11	0	2	243	11.5	18:26
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	651	186	226	412	-21	136	44	0	30	1657	11.2	17:10

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

28 goals and 32 assists in 82 games — 60 points — at 18:26 a night. Minus-5, 243 shots at 11.5 per cent, eleven on the power play, two game-winners, 16 penalty minutes.

It is his best goal total since the 34 he scored in 2017-18 and the first 82-game season of his career.

54.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 82nd percentile, with his ice at 61-54 against an expectation of 64.82-53.91 across 1,210 minutes.

He started 61.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 93rd percentile.

The Finesse Game

243 shots at a median of 21 feet, with 47 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty: 106 shots on goal and 19 goals, 17.92 per cent, which is the league forward rate of 17.71 almost exactly. From twenty to forty: 90 shots and 9 goals, 10.00 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty, two from 43.

That is a genuinely ordinary finisher taking a very large number of shots from good places. Two hundred and thirty-nine shots on goal, a hundred and ninety-six of them from inside forty feet, and the conversion sits on the rate at both distances.

Eleven of the 28 goals came on the power play, where he plays the off-wing one-timer, and 25 of his 339 tracked attempts are slap shots — a share that belongs almost entirely to that job.

42 tip-ins as well, 12.4 per cent, so the five-on-five work is at the net front. 93.6 mph at the 68th percentile.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 194 pounds, and 16 penalty minutes in 82 games, which is the lightest record of any Pittsburgh forward who played a full season.

2.95 miles a game at the 78th percentile, a top speed of 21.8 mph at the 23rd, 0.9 bursts above twenty a game at the 49th.

That is a modest tracking line: he covers ground without ever being quick, and he does not initiate. He is not a physical player and does not pretend to be one, which on a roster this old is a straightforward description rather than a complaint.

He goes to the front of the net for tips and gets moved out of it more often than a 194-pound winger should.

The Intangibles

Thirtieth overall in 2011, eleven seasons, 651 games, 412 points, eight of those seasons in Anaheim.

The pattern is a player who scores 30 when the club is good and 15 when it is not: 33 goals in 2016-17 and 34 in 2017-18 with Anaheim in the playoffs, then four seasons between 9 and 20 as that team came apart.

He is thirty on a two-way second line and produced 60 points. That is roughly the ceiling of the role and it is what he was signed to do.

186 career goals at 11.2 per cent. The rate has never been the story; the volume, and where it comes from, is.

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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
14:45 a game at five-on-five, 91st percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
62% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 92nd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He goes to the front of the net for tips and gets moved out of it more often than a 194-pound winger should.”
punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is not a physical player and does not pretend to be one, which on a roster this old is a straightforward description rather than a complaint.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,210 minutes

Expected goals: 54.6%; 85th pct
Shot attempts: 53.5%; 82nd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 61 for, 54 against. Expected: 64.8 and 53.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

78th

Numbers

85th

The two rank him within 7 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 — 72 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: 21.8 mph; 34th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.90 a game
Distance: 2.95 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.6 mph; 86th 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 · 1210 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: PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.6% — 1.6 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,210 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Sidney Crosby	57.7%	50.7%	50.3%
Jake Guentzel	57.8%	50.9%	49.4%
Kris Letang	53.7%	55.1%	53.7%

57.7% together, 50.7% for him apart and 50.3% for Crosby 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

333 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 30 of them goals. His median goal came from 15 feet. 47% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.