This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Ryan Lindgren
New York Rangers Defense
One goal on seventy-two shots on goal, and a plus-29 that is the best figure on the club.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | NYR | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -6 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0.0 | 14:35 |
| 2019-20 | NYR | 60 | 1 | 13 | 14 | +16 | 47 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 47 | 2.1 | 16:34 |
| 2020-21 | NYR | 51 | 1 | 15 | 16 | +20 | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 65 | 1.5 | 20:00 |
| 2021-22 | NYR | 78 | 4 | 11 | 15 | +18 | 48 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 73 | 5.5 | 20:06 |
| 2022-23 | NYR | 63 | 1 | 17 | 18 | +29 | 45 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 75 | 1.3 | 18:50 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 257 | 7 | 56 | 63 | +77 | 183 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 268 | 2.6 | 18:50 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 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
1 goal and 17 assists in 63 games — 18 points — at 18:50 a night. Plus-29, the best figure on the club, with 75 shots at 1.3 per cent, one shorthanded goal, 45 penalty minutes.
54.4 per cent of the expected goals, the 83rd percentile, with his ice at 49-29 against an expectation of 46.06-38.56 — nine and a half goals better than the chances at the defensive end, across 1,035 minutes.
He started 54.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 70th percentile.
Five seasons, 257 games, 63 points, and a career plus-77 from a man with seven career goals.
The Finesse Game
75 shots at a median of 50 feet, and one goal on seventy-two shots on goal.
Beyond forty: 47 shots on goal, none of them goals. From twenty to forty: 16 shots and 1 goal. Inside twenty: nine shots and none.
Seven goals in 257 career games. There is no argument to construct here and the club has never once needed one.
70 wrist shots out of 101 tracked attempts and nine slap shots. 87.7 mph at the 28th percentile, which for a defenceman is a low reading and is entirely consistent with a man who does not wind up.
56 career assists against 7 goals. The pass out is functional and short, and he gives the puck to Fox.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 194, with 45 penalty minutes in sixty-three games and 183 in his career.
Top speed 21.6 mph, the 18th percentile; 0.6 bursts a game, the 30th; 2.62 miles a game, the 55th.
Bottom fifth of the league in speed, playing nineteen minutes a night against good players — which works because none of the job requires a footrace.
He blocks shots, plays the body every time it is available, and clears the front of his own net against men who outweigh him by thirty pounds. The 83rd-percentile chance share and the plus-29 are what that adds up to.
The cost is the games. Sixty-three last season, 51 in 2020-21 and 60 in 2019-20 — a defenceman who defends this way at 194 pounds spends time out of the lineup.
The Intangibles
Forty-ninth overall in 2016 to Boston, traded to the Rangers at twenty, and 257 games since.
A career plus-77 across five seasons from a defenceman with 63 points is one of the odder lines in this book, and it has been assembled entirely alongside Fox.
He is twenty-five. What the file cannot separate is how much of the pairing’s record belongs to which man, and this book has no method that would let it — the two have barely played apart.
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
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
54.4% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 47.5% for his club in the minutes he sat: +6.9, 97th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
“He blocks shots, plays the body every time it is available, and clears the front of his own net against men who outweigh him by thirty pounds.”
“The 83rd-percentile chance share and the plus-29 are what that adds up to.”
“Bottom fifth of the league in speed, playing nineteen minutes a night against good players — which works because none of the job requires a footrace.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,035 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.4%
- 84th pct
- Shot attempts
- 54.1%
- 86th 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: 49 for, 29 against. Expected: 46.1 and 38.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 31 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 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, 2022-23 · 63 games
- Top speed
- 21.6 mph
- 51st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.60 a game
- Distance
- 2.62 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.7 mph
- 29th 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 90.0
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
2022-23 · 1035 minutes at five-on-five
- Adam Fox88%
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, 2022-23
- The club
- NYR took 49.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.4% — 5.2 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,035 minutes at five-on-five — 62nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Fox | 55.7% | 44.3% | 55.4% |
| Mika Zibanejad | 56.4% | 53.3% | 45.3% |
| Chris Kreider | 56.9% | 53.2% | 49.1% |
55.7% together, 44.3% for him apart and 55.4% for Fox apart. He was worse away from Fox, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Fox 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
98 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 13% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 66% from beyond forty.