This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Tommy Novak
Nashville Predators Center
Twenty-seven games at 25, and a top shot speed among the ten softest in the tracking file — off twenty-five shots.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | NSH | 27 | 1 | 6 | 7 | -4 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 25 | 4.0 | 11:48 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 27 | 1 | 6 | 7 | -4 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 25 | 4.0 | 11:48 |
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
27 games, 1 goal and 6 assists at 11:48 a night, minus-4, two penalty minutes, 25 shots. Eighty-fifth overall in 2015, his first NHL games, at 25.
The Finesse Game
Twenty-seven games is not enough for the qualified pools and this report will not pretend otherwise. Everything below is a description of a fragment.
Twenty-five shots produced one goal. Six of his seven points were assists.
53.9 per cent of the expected goals across 279 five-on-five minutes is the best share of any Predator forward in the file, and it came off 69 attacking-end starts against 49 defensive — soft usage in a small sample. His ice went 6-10 against an expectation of 10.60-9.08.
None of that is a season. It is one-third of one, in the easiest available minutes, and the direction of the goal difference runs against the direction of the chance share.
The Physical Game
Two penalty minutes in twenty-seven games. Nothing in the physical file registers at all — there is not enough ice time for the rates to mean anything, and the report declines to convert them.
At 6-1 and 190 he is ordinary for the position.
The Intangibles
78.1 mph is the 9th-softest top shot speed of the 649 skaters in the tracking file. The qualifier matters and it is large: a maximum is drawn from however many shots a man took, and he took twenty-five. A player with two hundred shots has eight times as many chances to record a hard one. The figure is real and it is not comparable.
21.0 mph is likewise a maximum off twenty-seven games, and 2.59 miles in his busiest game is a fifth-percentile figure for the same reason.
He is 25, a third-round pick from 2015, and had waited seven years for these twenty-seven games. There is a passer in here somewhere and the file cannot see him yet. What can be said is that the chance share was good, the sample was small, and everything else in this report is an artefact of how little he played.
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 279 minutes
- Expected goals
- 53.9%
- 81st pct
- Shot attempts
- 56.9%
- 95th 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: 6 for, 10 against. Expected: 10.6 and 9.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 72 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 — 50 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 · 27 games
- Top speed
- 21.0 mph
- 14th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.67 a game
- Distance
- 1.90 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 78.1 mph
- 16th 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 · 279 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, 2021-22
- The club
- NSH took 49.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.9% — 4.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 279 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philip Tomasino | 58.1% | 48.7% | 51.0% |
| Nick Cousins | 57.3% | 50.2% | 48.6% |
| Roman Josi | 57.2% | 50.9% | 50.9% |
58.1% together, 48.7% for him apart and 51.0% for Tomasino 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
36 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 41 feet. 28% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.