Robin Salo
New York Islanders Defense
Twenty-one games, and a top speed among the ten slowest in the tracking file — off twenty-one games.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | NYI | 21 | 1 | 4 | 5 | -6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 24 | 4.2 | 16:41 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 21 | 1 | 4 | 5 | -6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 24 | 4.2 | 16:41 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
21 games, 1 goal and 4 assists at 16:41 a night, minus-6, four penalty minutes, 24 shots. Forty-sixth overall in 2017, his first NHL games, at 23.
Twenty-one games is a quarter of a season and this report will describe rather than rank.
The Finesse Game
Twenty-four shots at a 53-foot median, none from the slot and ninety-three per cent from beyond forty feet. That is the purest point shot on the roster and it is drawn from twenty-four attempts.
Five points at sixteen and a half minutes a night — four of them assists.
43.9 per cent of the expected goals across 350 five-on-five minutes. His ice went 8-11 against an expectation of 10.45-13.35 — two goals short going forward and two fewer against than the model asked.
51.7 per cent of his end-zone starts came in the attacking end — ninety of them against eighty-four in his own end, which is below the two hundred this book needs before it will place a man in the league distribution.
The Physical Game
Four penalty minutes in twenty-one games at 6-1 and 191 pounds. There is nothing to read here and nothing worth converting into a rate.
The Intangibles
20.5 mph is the 8th-slowest top speed of the 649 skaters in the tracking file, and three recorded sprints over twenty miles an hour all season.
The qualifier is the whole of it. A top speed is a maximum, and a maximum is drawn from however much a man played: twenty-one games gives a quarter of the opportunities eighty gives. The figure is real, it is not comparable, and the report will not call him the slowest defenceman in hockey on that evidence.
He is 23, a second-round pick, and this was his first NHL season.
A left-shot defenceman who takes every shot from the blue line and got twenty-one games on a club that finished 29th in attempts is a file with almost nothing in it. What there is says the club was neither hiding him nor leaning on him.
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 350 minutes
- Expected goals
- 43.9%
- 14th pct
- Shot attempts
- 44%
- 10th 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: 8 for, 11 against. Expected: 10.4 and 13.3.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 8 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 48 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, 2021-22 · 21 games
- Top speed
- 20.5 mph
- 16th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.14 a game
- Distance
- 2.33 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 86.7 mph
- 22nd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.4
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
2021-22 · 333 minutes at five-on-five
- Andy Greeneoff the roster45%
- Noah Dobson14%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- NYI took 46.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.9% — 3.0 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 350 minutes at five-on-five — 11th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andy Greene | 42.1% | 45.6% | 44.5% |
| Mathew Barzal | 44.8% | 43.4% | 48.5% |
| Josh Bailey | 48.4% | 41.7% | 43.6% |
42.1% together, 45.6% for him apart and 44.5% for Greene apart. He was better away from Greene, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Greene.
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
28 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 49 feet. 0% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 93% from beyond forty.