Armchair Hockey Scout

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2024-25 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

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8

Ryan Donato

Chicago Blackhawks Center

Forty-five per cent of his shots from inside twenty feet, and thirty points on a club that scored 179.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2017-18BOS12549+222002420.814:42
2018-19BOS/MIN56101525-1563011397.213:42
2019-20MIN6214923+5120019514.710:38
2020-21SJS5061420-11102011045.812:36
2021-22SEA74161531-134010215910.113:48
2022-23SEA71141327+164600012211.511:15
2023-24CHI78121830-14261001498.114:00
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—4037788165-301429057929.712:46

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

Seventy-eight games, 12 goals and 18 assists, 1 on the power play, 14:00 a night and minus-14. He took 42.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 946 minutes, the 9th percentile, and his ice went 33-45 against an expectation of 34.00-46.22.

Thirty points at fourteen minutes a night on the club that scored fewest in the league is honest work. He converted 8.05 per cent of 149 shots against a career 9.72.

The Finesse Game

He takes 45 per cent of his attempts from inside 20 feet at a median of 22, which is a genuine scoring profile — he goes to the net and shoots from there rather than settling for the perimeter.

One hundred and forty-nine shots at 14:00 a night is a high volume for the ice time. Seventy-seven goals and 88 assists in 403 games is the record of a shooter who has never had a line to shoot from.

The Physical Game

He is 6-0 and 190 and goes into the traffic in front of the net without being a physical player anywhere else. Twenty-six penalty minutes in 78 games is an ordinary rate.

He does not win the wall and he does not kill penalties. The value is entirely in the offensive zone.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2014, son of a Boston Bruin, who has now played for six clubs in seven seasons and settled into a middle-six role that fits. Thirty points is his best return since Seattle.

On a club with 179 goals, a man who will shoot from inside twenty feet is worth keeping.

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

    78 of 82 games

    Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

  • net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips

    “He takes 45 per cent of his attempts from inside 20 feet at a median of 22, which is a genuine scoring profile — he goes to the net and shoots from there rather than settling for the perimeter.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He does not win the wall and he does not kill penalties.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 946 minutes

Expected goals
42.4%
10th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
44.5%
15th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 33 for, 45 against. Expected: 34.0 and 46.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
4th
Numbers
10th

The two rank him within 6 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 54 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, 2023-24 · 78 games

Top speed
21.8 mph
30th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.1

Bursts over 20 mph
0.73 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.21 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
92.1 mph
82nd pct

one shot; the league's average best is 84.5

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

2023-24 · 946 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, 2023-24

The club
CHI took 41.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.4% — 0.5 above the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 946 minutes at five-on-five — 52nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
MacKenzie Entwistle36.6%45.3%42.0%
Kevin Korchinski43.7%41.8%39.8%
Alex Vlasic46.8%40.6%46.3%

36.6% together, 45.3% for him apart and 42.0% for Entwistle apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

193 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 12 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.