This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Troy Stecher
Arizona Coyotes Defense
A 5-10 undrafted right shot with 359 NHL games, and the best chance share of any defenceman Arizona will dress.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | VAN | 71 | 3 | 21 | 24 | -16 | 25 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 125 | 2.4 | 19:59 |
| 2017-18 | VAN | 68 | 1 | 10 | 11 | -7 | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 94 | 1.1 | 18:49 |
| 2018-19 | VAN | 78 | 2 | 21 | 23 | +9 | 32 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 105 | 1.9 | 19:55 |
| 2019-20 | VAN | 69 | 5 | 12 | 17 | +10 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 86 | 5.8 | 15:21 |
| 2020-21 | DET | 44 | 3 | 8 | 11 | -13 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 55 | 5.5 | 17:19 |
| 2021-22 | DET/LAK | 29 | 1 | 2 | 3 | -7 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 50 | 2.0 | 16:40 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 359 | 15 | 74 | 89 | -24 | 149 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 515 | 2.9 | 18:16 |
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
With Detroit, then Los Angeles. 1 goal and 2 assists in 29 games — 3 points at 16:40 a night, minus-7, on 50 shots and 13 penalty minutes.
49.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 451 minutes — the best figure of any defenceman on this roster, four points clear of the next man and eleven clear of Dysin Mayo. His ice went 13-20 against an expectation of 19.36-19.81: six goals of scoring that the chances said should have arrived and did not.
Twenty-nine games is not a season, and 451 minutes is enough to be worth stating. On a blue line that owns the three lowest chance shares among the league’s qualified defencemen, a man at 49.4 is the most interesting signing of Arizona’s summer and nobody noticed.
The Finesse Game
50 attempts at a median of 54 feet with 80 per cent from beyond 40 and 8 per cent from inside 20, converting at 2 per cent. 74 assists and 15 goals in 359 career games is the record of a defenceman who moves the puck without threatening anybody.
The shot is heavy enough — 95.2 mph — and it comes from the point and stays there. He took no power play in Detroit or Los Angeles and will take none here.
The Physical Game
5-10 and 184, which is small for the position, and it is the reason he has been a third-pair defenceman at four organisations. At 5-10 he has no reach to defend with and never has, so he plays the puck rather than the man and relies on getting there first.
Top speed 21.3 mph and 2.32 miles a game. He is not quick enough to make the small-defenceman method work against a real forecheck, which is why the ceiling has always been where it is.
The Intangibles
Undrafted out of North Dakota, signed by Vancouver at twenty-two, and 359 NHL games since — four full seasons in Vancouver, two in Detroit and a deadline move to Los Angeles.
He is 28, signed here for a year. He is not a solution and he is a genuinely useful piece of evidence: on a defence corps where nobody else broke 46 per cent, the smallest man in it was the only one at even.
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.
“Undrafted out of North Dakota, signed by Vancouver at twenty-two, and 359 NHL games since”
“At 5-10 he has no reach to defend with and never has”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 451 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.4%
- 51st pct
- Shot attempts
- 49.1%
- 46th 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: 13 for, 20 against. Expected: 19.4 and 19.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 29 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 · 29 games
- Top speed
- 21.3 mph
- 38th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.28 a game
- Distance
- 2.32 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 95.2 mph
- 71st 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 90.4
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 with DET · 233 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
- LAK took 52.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.4% — 3.4 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 451 minutes at five-on-five — 15th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marc Staal | 42.5% | 52.5% | 47.4% |
| Alexander Edler | 52.7% | 47.7% | 57.6% |
| Trevor Moore | 53.4% | 48.6% | 55.9% |
42.5% together, 52.5% for him apart and 47.4% for Staal apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.
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
66 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 57 feet. 8% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 80% from beyond forty.