This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Sebastian Aho
Carolina Hurricanes Center
Thirty-six goals at 16.5 per cent, on a club that finished 31st in the league at converting its chances.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | CAR | 82 | 24 | 25 | 49 | -1 | 26 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 214 | 11.2 | 16:47 |
| 2017-18 | CAR | 78 | 29 | 36 | 65 | +4 | 24 | 8 | 0 | 4 | 200 | 14.5 | 17:55 |
| 2018-19 | CAR | 82 | 30 | 53 | 83 | +25 | 26 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 243 | 12.3 | 20:09 |
| 2019-20 | CAR | 68 | 38 | 28 | 66 | +10 | 26 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 206 | 18.4 | 19:25 |
| 2020-21 | CAR | 56 | 24 | 33 | 57 | +16 | 32 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 148 | 16.2 | 19:28 |
| 2021-22 | CAR | 79 | 37 | 44 | 81 | +18 | 38 | 13 | 1 | 9 | 221 | 16.7 | 18:57 |
| 2022-23 | CAR | 75 | 36 | 31 | 67 | +8 | 42 | 7 | 3 | 9 | 218 | 16.5 | 19:30 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 520 | 218 | 250 | 468 | +80 | 214 | 52 | 16 | 45 | 1450 | 15.0 | 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
36 goals and 31 assists in 75 games — 67 points at 19:30 a night, plus-8, with 9 game-winning goals and 3 shorthanded.
218 shots converting at 16.51 per cent, against a career rate of 15.03 across 520 games. On a club whose five-on-five goals came in at 174 against an expectation of 192.3 — a shortfall of eighteen, 31st in the league — the first thing to establish about Aho is that he was not part of it.
59.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,020 minutes. His ice went 53-42 against an expectation of 55.94-38.54, which is a small miss in both directions and by this club’s standards a good season.
The Finesse Game
312 unblocked attempts at a median of 20 feet, with 51 per cent from inside twenty and 18 per cent from beyond forty. Break it at forty and the finishing is where the shot chart says it should be: 34 goals on 179 shots from inside forty, at 18.99 per cent, and three from outside it.
Set him beside his own defencemen and the club’s shape is obvious. Pesce took 114 shots from beyond forty feet and scored two. Aho took 179 from inside forty and scored 34. The chances were always going to be created — Carolina led the league in generating them — and the season turned on who could finish one.
67 points is down from 81, and the drop is in the assists rather than the goals. He has scored 218 in 520 games and the shooting has never wobbled.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 189, 42 penalty minutes, and a game built on getting to the interior rather than through people.
There is no NHL Edge tracking for him in this edition, so nothing here can be said about his skating from measurement — the feed carries him in the three seasons that follow and not in this one. What the shot chart shows is a player who arrives in the slot repeatedly against defencemen who know he is coming, and that is an inference from where the puck left his stick, not from anything that timed him getting there.
The Intangibles
Three shorthanded goals says he kills penalties, and Carolina’s kill was fifth in the league in expected goals against a sixty.
A second-round pick at 35th overall in 2015 who has been the best forward on a contender for six years. Nine game-winners in a 75-game season is the kind of number this book has learned not to build a trait on, and it is still the sort of thing a reader should know.
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
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.
“Three shorthanded goals says he kills penalties”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,020 minutes
- Expected goals
- 59.2%
- 97th pct
- Shot attempts
- 58.4%
- 96th 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: 53 for, 42 against. Expected: 55.9 and 38.5.
The eye and the numbers
Not recordedThe two rank him within 0 points of one another. Whether it was written with these numbers in view was not recorded, so neither the agreement nor the gap can be read as independent.
Both bars are percentiles among the 141 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 78 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.
Usual linemates
2022-23 · 1020 minutes at five-on-five
- Seth Jarvis69%
- Martin Necas33%
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
- CAR took 58.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 59.2% — 0.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 1,020 minutes at five-on-five — 60th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seth Jarvis | 62.3% | 51.4% | 50.5% |
| Brent Burns | 62.2% | 57.0% | 58.8% |
| Brett Pesce | 56.7% | 61.0% | 55.5% |
62.3% together, 51.4% for him apart and 50.5% for Jarvis 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
312 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 37 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.