This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Timothy Liljegren
Toronto Maple Leafs Defense
Eleven goals fewer against than the chances called for, and four goals from nineteen mid-slot shots.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | TOR | 11 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -5 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 10:18 |
| 2020-21 | TOR | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 15:06 |
| 2021-22 | TOR | 61 | 5 | 18 | 23 | +15 | 14 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 79 | 6.3 | 16:24 |
| 2022-23 | TOR | 67 | 6 | 12 | 18 | +24 | 30 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 84 | 7.1 | 17:55 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 141 | 11 | 31 | 42 | +35 | 48 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 166 | 6.6 | 16:38 |
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
6 goals and 12 assists in 67 games — 18 points — at 17:55 a night. Plus-24, 84 shots at 7.1 per cent, one shorthanded, 30 penalty minutes.
54.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,055 minutes, the 81st percentile, with his ice at 50-31 against an expectation of 50.13-41.79.
Fifty goals for against fifty expected, and thirty-one against against forty-two expected. The attacking half of his ice was exactly what the chances predicted; the defensive half came in eleven goals better. That is a goaltending number as much as a defending one, and the plus-24 rests on it.
He started 52.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 60th percentile.
The Finesse Game
84 shots at a median of 48 feet, with 74 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 4 per cent from inside twenty.
From twenty to forty feet: 19 shots on goal and four goals — 21.05 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 8.83. Beyond forty: 60 shots and two goals, 3.33, on the league rate of 3.17. Inside twenty: three shots and no goals.
Four goals from nineteen shots in the mid-slot is two and a half times the positional rate, and nineteen shots is not enough to mean anything. The long band is the honest one, and it is exactly ordinary.
110 tracked attempts, 62 of them wrist shots and 32 slap — a 29.1 per cent share, the 41st-highest of the 153 defencemen in this book with a hundred attempts. 92.9 mph at the 64th percentile.
Six goals is a career high and 42 points in 141 games is a reasonable start for a right-handed defenceman who has not yet had a full season.
He walks the line and moves it early rather than holding it, which is the half of the offensive game the assists come from.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 200 pounds, with 30 penalty minutes in 67 games and 48 in 141 career games — a low rate.
Top speed 22.2 mph at the 43rd percentile, 0.8 bursts above twenty a game at the 45th, 2.57 miles a game at the 49th. The median of the league on all three measures, almost exactly.
That is worth stating flatly because the scouting reputation coming out of the draft was skating, and the tracking does not show it. He is not slow. He is average.
He is not a physical defenceman and does not win a wall battle by force, which at 200 pounds against the men who play in front of nets is the ceiling on the defensive half.
The Intangibles
Seventeenth overall in 2017, four seasons, 141 games, 42 points, all of them here.
11 goals and 31 assists, and a plus-35 across 141 games on good clubs.
He is twenty-four, right-handed, and the only defenceman on this roster under twenty-five who has established himself at all.
What the file describes is a useful third-pair defenceman with second-pair minutes ahead of him, on a club that has just spent two summers trying to buy the position instead. The eleven-goal gap in his defensive column is the thing to watch: if it closes, the plus-24 closes with it.
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.
“He walks the line and moves it early rather than holding it, which is the half of the offensive game the assists come from.”
“He is not a physical defenceman and does not win a wall battle by force, which at 200 pounds against the men who play in front of nets is the ceiling on the defensive half.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,055 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54.5%
- 84th pct
- Shot attempts
- 50.8%
- 60th 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: 50 for, 31 against. Expected: 50.1 and 41.8.
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 · 67 games
- Top speed
- 22.2 mph
- 72nd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.84 a game
- Distance
- 2.57 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 92.9 mph
- 55th 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 · 1055 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
- TOR took 54.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.5% — level with the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 1,055 minutes at five-on-five — 64th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rasmus Sandin | 59.5% | 51.9% | 50.3% |
| William Nylander | 58.5% | 52.4% | 57.3% |
| Michael Bunting | 55.3% | 54.1% | 56.2% |
59.5% together, 51.9% for him apart and 50.3% for Sandin 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
108 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 35 feet. 4% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 74% from beyond forty.