This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Tomas Nosek
Boston Bruins Left Wing
Three goals on 84 shots at 3.6 per cent — the 2nd percentile — and 1:49 a night shorthanded on the sixth-best penalty kill in hockey.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | DET | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 10:08 |
| 2016-17 | DET | 11 | 1 | 0 | 1 | -1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 19 | 5.3 | 10:07 |
| 2017-18 | VGK | 67 | 7 | 8 | 15 | +6 | 14 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 92 | 7.6 | 11:06 |
| 2018-19 | VGK | 68 | 8 | 9 | 17 | -10 | 18 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 116 | 6.9 | 12:28 |
| 2019-20 | VGK | 67 | 8 | 7 | 15 | -2 | 20 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 93 | 8.6 | 11:36 |
| 2020-21 | VGK | 38 | 8 | 10 | 18 | +7 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 59 | 13.6 | 13:00 |
| 2021-22 | BOS | 75 | 3 | 14 | 17 | -9 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 84 | 3.6 | 13:21 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 332 | 35 | 48 | 83 | -11 | 98 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 465 | 7.5 | 12:09 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
3 goals and 14 assists in 75 games — 17 points at 13:21 a night, minus-9, on 84 shots and 32 penalty minutes.
Three goals off 84 attempts is 3.6 per cent, the 2nd percentile among the league’s forwards. He had 35 in 332 career games before this.
51.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 849 minutes, the 67th percentile. His ice went 26-37 against an expectation of 31.46-29.56 — five goals of scoring missing and seven more conceded than the chances predicted, both of which are among the poorest results any Boston forward produced.
1:49 a night shorthanded, the 85th percentile among forwards, on a penalty kill that finished 6th in the league.
The Finesse Game
84 attempts at a median of 25 feet with 50 per cent from inside 20 — the locations are fine — off a shot that leaves at 81.5 mph, the 4th percentile of velocity. That is the explanation for three goals: he gets to the right place and cannot beat a goaltender from it.
1.04 even-strength points per 60 is the 9th percentile among forwards. There is no scoring case and Boston is not making one.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 199, and 5.10 hits per 60 at the 62nd percentile with 2.04 blocks at the 67th. He is a fourth-line centre who wins a defensive-zone draw and gets the puck out, and the club values him for exactly that.
Top speed 22.4 mph at the 45th percentile. Ordinary feet, ordinary engine.
The Intangibles
Undrafted out of the Czech league, signed by Detroit at twenty-two, and 332 NHL games since — most of them in Vegas, including a run to a Cup final.
He is 30, on the second year of a two-year deal. A fourth-line centre who kills penalties and shoots at the 2nd percentile is a perfectly ordinary thing for a contender to carry, and the only reason his name is worth reading twice is that Boston’s fourth line lost seven goals to its own expectation last season and two of the three men on it are in this book with shooting seasons nobody can explain.
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.
“1:49 a night shorthanded, the 85th percentile among forwards”
“Undrafted out of the Czech league, signed by Detroit at twenty-two, and 332 NHL games since”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 849 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.6%
- 67th pct
- Shot attempts
- 50.6%
- 61st 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: 26 for, 37 against. Expected: 31.5 and 29.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 45 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 54 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, 2021-22 · 75 games
- Top speed
- 22.4 mph
- 61st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.85 a game
- Distance
- 2.15 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 81.5 mph
- 26th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.1
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
2021-22 · 849 minutes at five-on-five
- Nick Foligno32%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- BOS took 56.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.6% — 4.6 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 849 minutes at five-on-five — 45th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curtis Lazar | 51.4% | 51.6% | 53.0% |
| Brandon Carlo | 48.2% | 53.3% | 53.5% |
| Nick Foligno | 56.0% | 49.6% | 54.7% |
51.4% together, 51.6% for him apart and 53.0% for Lazar apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.
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
124 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 44% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 15% from beyond forty.