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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33

Ryan Johnson

Buffalo Sabres Defense

Fifty-two point eight per cent of the chances in a first NHL season, and no goals.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2023-24BUF41077+312000350.013:52
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—41077+312000350.013:52

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

No goals and 7 assists in 41 games — 7 points at 13:52 a night, plus-3, on 35 shots with 12 penalty minutes. His first NHL season, at 22.

52.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 549 minutes, the 73rd percentile — the best mark of any defenceman on this roster. His ice went 22-17 against an expectation of 23.37-21.01.

The Finesse Game

35 attempts at a median of 54 feet, with 69 per cent from beyond 40 and 2 per cent from inside 20, and none of them scored.

Seven assists in forty-one games. The skating is why he is in the league — he retrieves under pressure and turns up ice in one motion, and the outlet is early. There is no shot and there is no offensive game to develop beyond moving the puck quickly.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 195 and light. He cannot clear his crease against a heavy forward and the defending is positional and stick-first.

12 penalty minutes in 41 games. He does not retaliate and he does not take liberties.

The Intangibles

Thirty-first overall in 2019, three years at Minnesota-Duluth, and an NHL regular at 22 on a blue line that already had a first-overall pick on each side.

Seventy-third percentile of chances in a first season is a genuinely encouraging number and it came in third-pairing minutes. He is the seventh first-round pick on this roster and there is nowhere obvious to play him.

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.

  • drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there

    52.7% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 48.3% for his club in the minutes he sat: +4.4, 91st percentile among defencemen

    Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “**The skating is why he is in the league** — he retrieves under pressure and turns up ice in one motion, and the outlet is early.”

  • clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net

    “**He cannot clear his crease against a heavy forward** and the defending is positional and stick-first.”

  • retaliateshe lacks it· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty

    “12 penalty minutes in 41 games. He does not retaliate and he does not take liberties.”

  • takes-libertieshe lacks it· crosses the line and knows where it is

    “12 penalty minutes in 41 games. He does not retaliate and he does not take liberties.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 549 minutes

Expected goals
52.7%
73rd pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
52.6%
76th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 22 for, 17 against. Expected: 23.4 and 21.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
8th
Numbers
73rd

The numbers rank him 65 points above where the report does. 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 652 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, 2023-24 · 41 games

Top speed
21.3 mph
35th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.7

Bursts over 20 mph
0.39 a game

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

Distance
2.04 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
85.8 mph
22nd pct

one shot; the league's average best is 90.2

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 · 549 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
BUF took 48.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.7% — 3.8 above the club he did it on.
The role
549 minutes at five-on-five — 21st percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Connor Clifton50.9%53.5%46.0%
JJ Peterka55.5%51.5%51.6%
Kyle Okposo50.9%53.3%47.4%

50.9% together, 53.5% for him apart and 46.0% for Clifton apart. Clifton was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Clifton 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.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

54 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 0 of them goals. 2% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 69% from beyond forty.