Tomas Tatar

Eight hundred and fifty-three games, 479 points, and half his attempts from inside twenty feet at 33.

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

2010-11	DET	9	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	6	16.7	9:36
2012-13	DET	18	4	3	7	+2	4	1	0	0	32	12.5	11:22
2013-14	DET	73	19	20	39	+12	30	2	0	3	158	12.0	14:21
2014-15	DET	82	29	27	56	+6	28	9	0	7	211	13.7	16:13
2015-16	DET	81	21	24	45	+4	24	7	0	3	165	12.7	14:21
2016-17	DET	82	25	21	46	-8	26	5	0	5	166	15.1	17:17
2017-18	DET/VGK	82	20	14	34	-19	34	9	0	4	174	11.5	16:16
2018-19	MTL	80	25	33	58	+21	34	4	0	4	195	12.8	16:25
2019-20	MTL	68	22	39	61	+5	36	8	0	1	162	13.6	16:18
2020-21	MTL	50	10	20	30	0	8	2	0	1	82	12.2	14:59
2021-22	NJD	76	15	15	30	-22	22	2	0	1	132	11.4	14:50
2022-23	NJD	82	20	28	48	+41	30	1	0	1	153	13.1	15:07
2023-24	COL/SEA	70	9	15	24	+8	20	0	0	2	72	12.5	12:27
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	853	220	259	479	+50	296	50	0	32	1708	12.9	15:14

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

70 games in Colorado and Seattle, 9 goals and 15 assists for 24 points, 20 penalty minutes, 12:27 a night and plus-8. He took 50.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 810 minutes, the 53rd percentile, and his ice went 37-27 against an expectation of 31.61-31.49.

Five goals of finishing above what the chances were worth and four fewer conceded than they called for. Twenty-four points at twelve and a half minutes a night is a fourth-line season for a man who has scored twenty goals seven times.

The Finesse Game

72 shots at a median of 20 feet with half of them from inside 20, converted at 12.5 per cent against a career 12.88.

259 career assists in 853 games. The hands are intact and the ice is gone; seventy-two shots in seventy games is a third of what he used to take. He still finds the middle and he no longer gets sent there.

The Physical Game

He is 5-10 and 173 and has never played a physical game.

296 career penalty minutes in 853 games is a low rate. He does not forecheck by force, does not win the wall, and is easy to move off a puck.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2009 out of Ilava, thirteen seasons across six organisations, and 479 points in 853 games.

He is 33 and this is his second spell in New Jersey. A twelve-minute winger who finishes above expectation and does not defend is a specific and limited thing, and New Jersey has bought three of them.

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.

punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is 5-10 and 173 and has never played a physical game.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck by force, does not win the wall, and is easy to move off a puck.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck by force, does not win the wall, and is easy to move off a puck.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He does not forecheck by force, does not win the wall, and is easy to move off a puck.”
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He still finds the middle and he no longer gets sent there.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 810 minutes

Expected goals: 50.1%; 54th pct
Shot attempts: 51.1%; 64th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 37 for, 27 against. Expected: 31.6 and 31.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

35th

Numbers

54th

The two rank him within 19 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 — 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, 2023-24 · 70 games

Top speed: 21.2 mph; 14th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.46 a game
Distance: 1.99 miles a game
Hardest shot: 84.5 mph; 36th 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 with SEA · 529 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: SEA took 50.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.1% — 0.7 below the club he did it on.
The role: 810 minutes at five-on-five — 40th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jordan Eberle	58.1%	44.8%	53.9%
Matty Beniers	55.3%	47.8%	50.2%
Adam Larsson	52.9%	49.1%	47.7%

58.1% together, 44.8% for him apart and 53.9% for Eberle 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

117 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 10% from beyond forty.