This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Ross Johnston

Nine shots in thirty-two games, forty-four penalty minutes, and 246 in a career that began undrafted.

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

2015-16	NYI	1	0	0	0	0	4	0	0	0	0	—	16:17
2017-18	NYI	24	3	3	6	0	62	0	0	0	19	15.8	9:20
2018-19	NYI	17	1	3	4	+3	23	0	0	0	12	8.3	7:55
2019-20	NYI	32	3	1	4	+1	78	0	0	0	16	18.8	7:59
2020-21	NYI	12	0	1	1	-3	35	0	0	0	5	0.0	8:44
2021-22	NYI	32	2	5	7	-3	44	0	0	0	9	22.2	10:16
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	118	9	13	22	-2	246	0	0	0	61	14.8	9:01

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

32 games, 2 goals and 5 assists at 10:16 a night, minus-3, forty-four penalty minutes, nine shots. Undrafted, and 118 NHL games across six seasons out of it.

Nine shots in thirty-two games. Two of them went in.

The Finesse Game

Nine shots is fewer than a third of a shot a game and this book has no percentile that means anything at that volume. Sixty-one shots and nine goals is the whole career, across 118 games.

39.5 per cent of the expected goals across 327 five-on-five minutes is the worst share on the roster. His ice went 9-12 against an expectation of 8.89-13.62.

37.5 per cent of his end-zone starts came in the attacking end — sixty-three against a hundred and five — which is buried usage on a club that was already being outchanced.

The chance share and the deployment point the same way and neither is large enough to separate the man from the assignment.

The Physical Game

Forty-four penalty minutes in thirty-two games, and 246 across a 118-game career at 6-5 and 232 pounds.

That is better than two penalty minutes a game across six seasons, from a forward who averages ten minutes of ice.

He is the second-heaviest skater in this chapter and the club gives him the least ice time on the roster.

The Intangibles

21.6 mph, nineteen recorded sprints and 51.4 miles across thirty-two games. All three are counts or maximums off a third of a season and none is comparable to a full one.

He is 28, undrafted, and has never played more than thirty-two games in a season.

A 6-5 fourth-liner who takes nine shots a year and two penalty minutes a game is a specific and increasingly rare kind of player, and the file records the specialty without being able to say what it is worth. What it can say is that his ice was outchanced more heavily than anyone else’s on a club that was outchanced all year.

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.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, and 118 NHL games across six seasons out of it.”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“Forty-four penalty minutes in thirty-two games, and 246 across a 118-game career at 6-5 and 232 pounds.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 327 minutes

Expected goals: 39.5%; 3rd pct
Shot attempts: 41.3%; 3rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 9 for, 12 against. Expected: 8.9 and 13.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

8th

Numbers

3rd

The two rank him within 5 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 — 49 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 · 32 games

Top speed: 21.6 mph; 28th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.59 a game
Distance: 1.61 miles a game
Hardest shot: 84.8 mph; 37th 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

2021-22 · 327 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, 2021-22

The club: NYI took 46.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 39.5% — 7.4 below the club he did it on.
The role: 327 minutes at five-on-five — 9th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Casey Cizikas	38.8%	40.6%	44.2%
Matt Martin	41.1%	38.3%	48.3%
Andy Greene	36.3%	41.7%	45.2%

38.8% together, 40.6% for him apart and 44.2% for Cizikas apart. Cizikas was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more 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.