This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

Ryan Reaves

A thousand and twenty-three career penalty minutes, and the third-least ground covered of any skater in this book.

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

2010-11	STL	28	2	2	4	-1	78	0	0	1	16	12.5	6:48
2011-12	STL	60	3	1	4	0	124	0	0	1	32	9.4	6:32
2012-13	STL	43	4	2	6	+3	79	0	0	1	24	16.7	7:27
2013-14	STL	63	2	6	8	-1	126	0	0	0	25	8.0	8:31
2014-15	STL	81	6	6	12	-3	116	0	0	1	55	10.9	8:31
2015-16	STL	64	3	1	4	-6	68	0	0	0	31	9.7	8:02
2016-17	STL	80	7	6	13	+4	104	0	0	1	58	12.1	8:53
2017-18	PIT/VGK	79	4	6	10	-7	94	0	0	1	42	9.5	7:36
2018-19	VGK	80	9	11	20	+1	74	3	0	2	95	9.5	10:52
2019-20	VGK	71	8	7	15	-5	47	0	0	1	61	13.1	10:09
2020-21	VGK	37	1	4	5	0	27	0	0	0	26	3.9	9:56
2021-22	NYR	69	5	8	13	-13	43	0	0	0	44	11.4	10:39
2022-23	NYR/MIN	73	5	10	15	-6	43	0	0	0	48	10.4	9:20
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	828	59	70	129	-34	1023	3	0	9	557	10.6	8:51

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

5 goals and 10 assists in 73 games — 15 points — at 9:20 a night between the Rangers and Minnesota. Minus-6, 48 shots at 10.4 per cent, 43 penalty minutes.

44 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 674 minutes, the 10th percentile, with his ice at 21-25 against an expectation of 21.43-27.25.

He started 38.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 10th percentile: 124 attacking draws against 200 defensive ones.

Nine minutes and twenty seconds a night is the role, and it has been the role for thirteen seasons.

The Finesse Game

48 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 51 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 26 shots on goal and five goals — 19.23 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 13 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: nine shots and no goals.

Every goal from inside twenty feet, which at 6-2 and 225 pounds is the only place he is going to score from and, to be fair to him, is where he shoots from.

69 tracked attempts in 73 games, 22 of them wrist shots and 13 tip-ins. 90.7 mph at the 48th percentile.

59 goals in 828 career games at 10.6 per cent. That is a better finishing rate than the reputation carries, on the smallest volume any regular takes.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 225 pounds, with 1,023 penalty minutes in 828 career games — a minute and a quarter a game for thirteen seasons.

Top speed 21.4 mph at the 10th percentile, 0.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 25th, and 1.46 miles a game — the 0th percentile, and the third-least of the 574 skaters in this book who played forty games.

That is what nine minutes of fourth-line ice time looks like measured, and it is also a thirty-six-year-old heavyweight who does not chase what he cannot catch.

He is punishing, he is nasty, and he fights — and at this stage of a career the reputation does a good deal of the work the fists used to.

He answers for teammates, which is the job description and has been since 2010, and it is the reason a club that finished fourth in the league signed a thirty-six-year-old with fifteen points.

43 penalty minutes ties his lowest total in any season of sixty games or more, matching 2021-22, which says the league has changed around him more than he has.

The Intangibles

A hundred and fifty-sixth overall in 2005, the fifth round, thirteen seasons, 828 games, 129 points across St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Vegas, the Rangers and Minnesota.

59 goals, 70 assists and 1,023 penalty minutes.

He is thirty-six, signed by a club that has been eliminated in the first round in most of the seasons it has been good, and has decided part of the answer is this.

Whether that is true is the single most contested question in this chapter, and this book has nothing to say about it. What it can say is what the columns above say: nine minutes a night, a 10th-percentile chance share, the least ground covered of nearly anyone, and a fighting record that no data in this project measures.

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
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.

punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is punishing, he is nasty, and he fights — and at this stage of a career the reputation does a good deal of the work the fists used to.”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“He answers for teammates, which is the job description and has been since 2010, and it is the reason a club that finished fourth in the league signed a thirty-six-year-old with fifteen points.”
edgeshe lacks it· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“That is what nine minutes of fourth-line ice time looks like measured, and it is also a thirty-six-year-old heavyweight who does not chase what he cannot catch.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 674 minutes

Expected goals: 44%; 15th pct
Shot attempts: 45.1%; 18th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 21 for, 25 against. Expected: 21.4 and 27.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

20th

Numbers

15th

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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 59 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 · 73 games

Top speed: 21.4 mph; 21st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.49 a game
Distance: 1.46 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.7 mph; 70th 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

2022-23 with MIN · 572 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, 2022-23

The club: MIN took 50.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.0% — 6.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 674 minutes at five-on-five — 29th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Connor Dewar	42.6%	46.5%	48.8%
Mason Shaw	43.1%	44.7%	49.3%
Matt Dumba	47.3%	42.2%	49.8%

42.6% together, 46.5% for him apart and 48.8% for Dewar 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

69 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 7 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.