Rudolfs Balcers
Florida Panthers Left Wing
The 6th-most ground covered of the 365 forwards the tracking follows, and the 8th percentile for attacking-zone time.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | OTT | 36 | 5 | 9 | 14 | -7 | 10 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 48 | 10.4 | 12:21 |
| 2019-20 | OTT | 15 | 1 | 2 | 3 | -2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 23 | 4.3 | 12:08 |
| 2020-21 | SJS | 41 | 8 | 9 | 17 | -6 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 66 | 12.1 | 14:43 |
| 2021-22 | SJS | 61 | 11 | 12 | 23 | -3 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 98 | 11.2 | 15:02 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 153 | 25 | 32 | 57 | -18 | 46 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 235 | 10.6 | 14:02 |
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
11 goals and 12 assists in 61 games for San Jose — 23 points and a minus-3 at 15:02 a night, the 46th percentile among forwards — with 20 penalty minutes.
46.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 917 minutes, the 23rd percentile — on a San Jose club that finished 31st in shot-attempt share.
The Finesse Game
6.41 shots per 60 is the 32nd percentile among forwards and eleven goals on 98 shots is 11.2 per cent, the 48th. 49 per cent from the slot at a median of 26 feet — ordinary everywhere.
1.58 even-strength points per 60 is the 37th percentile and not one of his twenty-three points came on the power play, off 0:14 a night.
2.29 takeaways per 60 is the 87th percentile against 1.96 giveaways at the 75th — the best figure on the page and the reason he keeps a job.
85.1 mph is the 16th percentile.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 182. 7.52 hits per 60 is the 78th percentile among forwards and 2.81 blocks is the 90th — a genuinely committed physical game from a man who is 182 pounds.
10.65 miles per 60 is the 6th-most of the 365 forwards the tracking covers, with 10.9 bursts over 20 mph per 60 at the 90th percentile and a 23.0 mph top speed at the 81st. He covers more ground than all but five forwards in the league and he sprints while he is doing it.
38.6 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the attacking zone, the 8th percentile. All that skating and the puck was at the other end, which is what a third-line winger on the 31st-ranked club produces.
0.59 penalties taken per 60 is the 45th percentile.
The Intangibles
One hundred and forty-second overall in 2015, the fifth round, and 153 NHL games at 25 with 57 points and a career minus-18 across two organisations.
Four seasons of seventeen to twenty-three points at fourteen or fifteen minutes. The record is a bottom-six winger and the skating file is better than that.
Florida has lost Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar and Mason Marchment and gained Matthew Tkachuk. He is the thirteenth forward on the club that finished first, and the case for him is that the tracking says the legs are top ten in the league. What the tracking cannot say is why a man who skates like that spent last season in his own end.
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 covers more ground than all but five forwards in the league and he sprints while he is doing it.”
“a genuinely committed physical game from a man who is 182 pounds”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 837 minutes
- Expected goals
- 46.8%
- 29th pct
- Shot attempts
- 47.3%
- 32nd 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: 30 for, 34 against. Expected: 30.8 and 35.0.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 4 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 — 57 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 · 61 games
- Top speed
- 23.0 mph
- 88th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.72 a game
- Distance
- 2.67 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 85.1 mph
- 39th 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 84.1
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 with SJS · 837 minutes at five-on-five
- Tomas Hertl45%
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
- SJS took 47.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.8% — 0.6 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 837 minutes at five-on-five — 44th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tomas Hertl | 49.5% | 44.7% | 48.5% |
| Brent Burns | 46.2% | 47.2% | 47.0% |
| Mario Ferraro | 43.1% | 48.3% | 46.7% |
49.5% together, 44.7% for him apart and 48.5% for Hertl apart. He was worse away from Hertl, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Hertl did.
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
131 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 34% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 27% from beyond forty.