This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Sean Kuraly

Four hundred and eighty games of fourth-line work, and the fifteenth percentile of chances.

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

2016-17	BOS	8	0	1	1	-1	2	0	0	0	11	0.0	9:12
2017-18	BOS	75	6	8	14	-5	40	0	0	1	134	4.5	12:15
2018-19	BOS	71	8	13	21	+6	38	0	0	3	134	6.0	13:46
2019-20	BOS	69	6	17	23	-2	34	0	0	0	95	6.3	13:17
2020-21	BOS	47	4	5	9	-10	20	0	0	2	88	4.5	14:04
2021-22	CBJ	77	14	16	30	+2	61	0	0	0	121	11.6	15:52
2022-23	CBJ	71	11	9	20	-28	68	1	1	0	100	11.0	15:04
2023-24	CBJ	62	9	9	18	-5	40	0	0	0	92	9.8	13:44
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	480	58	78	136	-43	303	1	1	6	775	7.5	13:56

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

9 goals and 9 assists in 62 games — 18 points at 13:44 a night, minus-5, on 92 shots at 9.78 per cent, and 40 penalty minutes.

43.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 724 minutes, the 14th percentile. His ice went 25-30 against an expectation of 26.89-34.50 — five goals scored above expectation and seven fewer conceded, which on this club was rare.

The Finesse Game

92 attempts at a median of 27 feet, with 42 per cent from inside 20 and 24 per cent from beyond 40, converting at 9.78 per cent. Fifty-eight goals in 480 career games.

9 assists. He does not create and he is not asked to — the job is to win the draw, get the puck deep and change.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 208, and he forechecks first and finishes his checks. He wins pucks below the goal line and he is one of the few forwards on this roster an opponent has to account for.

303 penalty minutes in 480 games and he will fight. He wins the draw that begins the shift and he is trusted a man short.

The Intangibles

A hundred and thirty-third overall in 2011 by San Jose, out of Miami of Ohio, and 480 games and 136 points at 31 across two clubs with a Stanley Cup final behind him.

A fifth-round pick who plays four hundred and eighty NHL games as a fourth-line centre has had exactly the career that role allows, and on a club whose penalty kill was 31st he is one of the few men doing the job properly.

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.

hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
33% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 4th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“**6-2 and 208, and he forechecks first and finishes his checks.** He wins pucks below the goal line and he is one of the few forwards on this roster an opponent has to account for.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“**6-2 and 208, and he forechecks first and finishes his checks.** He wins pucks below the goal line and he is one of the few forwards on this roster an opponent has to account for.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“**6-2 and 208, and he forechecks first and finishes his checks.** He wins pucks below the goal line and he is one of the few forwards on this roster an opponent has to account for.”
faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“**He wins the draw that begins the shift and he is trusted a man short.**”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“**He wins the draw that begins the shift and he is trusted a man short.**”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“**He does not create and he is not asked to** — the job is to win the draw, get the puck deep and change.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 724 minutes

Expected goals: 43.8%; 14th pct
Shot attempts: 47.8%; 33rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 25 for, 30 against. Expected: 26.9 and 34.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

27th

Numbers

14th

The two rank him within 13 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 — 64 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 · 62 games

Top speed: 22.8 mph; 78th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.47 a game
Distance: 2.24 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.8 mph; 69th 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

2023-24 · 724 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: CBJ took 45.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.8% — 2.1 below the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 724 minutes at five-on-five — 33rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Justin Danforth	49.5%	37.6%	44.4%
Alexandre Texier	46.0%	42.0%	41.5%
Mathieu Olivier	45.9%	42.4%	43.4%

49.5% together, 37.6% for him apart and 44.4% for Danforth apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

115 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 42% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 24% from beyond forty.