This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Robert Thomas
St. Louis Blues Center
Forty-seven assists in seventy-three games, and 169 of them in a 314-game career.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | STL | 70 | 9 | 24 | 33 | -2 | 14 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 80 | 11.3 | 13:04 |
| 2019-20 | STL | 66 | 10 | 32 | 42 | +9 | 18 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 87 | 11.5 | 14:34 |
| 2020-21 | STL | 33 | 3 | 9 | 12 | +1 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 22 | 13.6 | 13:36 |
| 2021-22 | STL | 72 | 20 | 57 | 77 | +17 | 16 | 3 | 2 | 6 | 115 | 17.4 | 18:46 |
| 2022-23 | STL | 73 | 18 | 47 | 65 | -8 | 22 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 106 | 17.0 | 19:21 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 314 | 60 | 169 | 229 | +17 | 80 | 12 | 3 | 11 | 410 | 14.6 | 16:12 |
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 47 assists in 73 games — 65 points — at 19:21 a night. Minus-8, 106 shots at 17.0 per cent, five on the power play, one shorthanded, two game-winners, 22 penalty minutes.
65 points in 73 games follows the 77 he scored in 72 the season before, which remains the career high.
46 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,038 minutes, the 21st percentile, with his ice at 58-53 against an expectation of 43.21-50.69 — fifteen goals more than the chances at the good end, which on a club that finished second in the league in finishing is the house style.
He started 55.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 75th percentile.
The Finesse Game
106 shots at a median of 23 feet, which is a small number of shots for a first-line centre playing nineteen minutes.
From twenty to forty feet: 49 shots on goal and ten goals — 20.41 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 43 shots and six goals, 13.95, below the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 12 shots and three goals.
A 17.0 per cent shooting percentage on a hundred and six shots is about six goals above what the volume would ordinarily produce, and a career 14.6 per cent across 410 shots says some of it is real.
But the shooting is the small half of this file. 169 assists in 314 games, against 60 goals, is one of the most lopsided ratios in this book, and it is the correct description of the player: he is a distributor who shoots when nothing else is available.
144 tracked attempts is a very low count for the ice time — 17 of them tip-ins and only six slap. 88.5 mph at the 34th percentile.
The hands and the delay are the skill. He holds the puck a beat longer than the defenceman expects and the pass arrives behind him.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 207 pounds, and 3.18 miles a game at the 89th percentile at a top speed of 21.9 mph, the 32nd, with 1.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 73rd.
Enormous ground covered from a modest top end, on a first-line centre playing nineteen minutes. That is the possession-centre shape and it is worth having.
22 penalty minutes in 73 games and 80 in 314 career games. He is not physical and does not need to be at 207 pounds with the puck on his stick.
He is hard to separate from the puck below the dots — the weight is used to protect rather than to hit, which is where the assist count comes from.
The Intangibles
Twentieth overall in 2017, five seasons, 314 games, 229 points, all of them here.
60 goals and 169 assists. The four full seasons read 33, 42, 77 and 65 points, and the last two are the ones that matter: 142 points in 145 games at twenty-two and twenty-three.
He is twenty-four, the club’s first-line centre, and signed long on a roster that has just been sold off. The 21st-percentile chance share is the one number to watch: a distributor on a club that finished twenty-seventh in chance share is being measured against a team, and the next two seasons will say how much of it was his.
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
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.
“He holds the puck a beat longer than the defenceman expects and the pass arrives behind him.”
“He is hard to separate from the puck below the dots — the weight is used to protect rather than to hit, which is where the assist count comes from.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,038 minutes
- Expected goals
- 46%
- 27th pct
- Shot attempts
- 47.4%
- 33rd 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: 58 for, 53 against. Expected: 43.2 and 50.7.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 65 points above where the numbers do. 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 78 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 · 73 games
- Top speed
- 21.9 mph
- 41st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.51 a game
- Distance
- 3.18 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.5 mph
- 59th 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 · 1038 minutes at five-on-five
- Jordan Kyrou62%
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
- STL took 45.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.0% — 0.2 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First line, 1,038 minutes at five-on-five — 62nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jordan Kyrou | 45.7% | 46.5% | 42.9% |
| Justin Faulk | 43.1% | 48.2% | 44.0% |
| Pavel Buchnevich | 48.4% | 44.4% | 49.2% |
45.7% together, 46.5% for him apart and 42.9% for Kyrou 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
143 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 19 of them goals. His median goal came from 26 feet. 41% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.