This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Urho Vaakanainen
Anaheim Ducks Defense
The player Anaheim got back for Hampus Lindholm: 45 NHL games, no goals, and a shot chart with three per cent of its attempts inside 20 feet.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | BOS | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 9:06 |
| 2019-20 | BOS | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 16:51 |
| 2020-21 | BOS | 9 | 0 | 2 | 2 | -3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 15 | 0.0 | 18:55 |
| 2021-22 | BOS/ANA | 29 | 0 | 6 | 6 | -5 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 27 | 0.0 | 19:19 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 45 | 0 | 8 | 8 | -7 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 46 | 0.0 | 18:30 |
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 Boston, then Anaheim. 0 goals and 6 assists in 29 games — 6 points at 19:19 a night, minus-5, on 27 shots and 10 penalty minutes.
Nineteen minutes a night is a top-four workload and 29 games is not a season. Most of it came after the trade, on a club that had just sold the two defencemen ahead of him.
43.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 500 minutes. His ice went 23-31 against an expectation of 17.56-23.16 — five and a half goals of scoring above what the chances predicted and nearly eight more conceded than they did. On 500 minutes none of those gaps mean very much; the 43.1 is the number with enough behind it to be worth reading, and it is poor.
The Finesse Game
27 attempts at a median of 54 feet, with 74 per cent from beyond 40 and 3 per cent from inside 20, and no goals. He has none in 45 career games.
8 assists in 45 games and no power-play time at all. There is no offensive dimension to this player and the club that drafted him eighteenth overall never found one either.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 202, a positional defender who plays gaps rather than bodies. He kills a play by taking away the lane rather than the man, which is the half of defending that shows up nowhere in this book’s measurements.
The tracking reads badly and has to be read carefully. His top speed of 20.3 mph sits at the very bottom of the league tracking, the 0th percentile — but a top speed is a season best, and a man who played 29 games had a third of the opportunities to set one that a regular did. Take it as evidence he is not fast, not as evidence he is the slowest player in the league.
The Intangibles
Eighteenth overall in 2017 by Boston, and 45 NHL games in five professional seasons since.
He is 23, and he came to Anaheim in March as part of the return for Hampus Lindholm. A club that has just traded its best defenceman is now finding out whether the piece it took back is a third-pair defender or a spare one, and 29 games say nothing either way. This season is the audition, and the minutes are there for the taking because there is nobody in front of him.
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.
“He kills a play by taking away the lane rather than the man”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 500 minutes
- Expected goals
- 43.1%
- 10th pct
- Shot attempts
- 44.1%
- 11th 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: 23 for, 31 against. Expected: 17.6 and 23.2.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 6 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 47 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
- 20.3 mph
- 11th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.14 a game
- Distance
- 2.67 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.4 mph
- 29th 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 · 253 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
- ANA took 48.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.1% — 4.9 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 500 minutes at five-on-five — 18th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jamie Drysdale | 35.3% | 46.4% | 49.2% |
| Kevin Shattenkirk | 43.8% | 42.9% | 46.9% |
| Charlie McAvoy | 60.9% | 39.3% | 61.2% |
35.3% together, 46.4% for him apart and 49.2% for Drysdale 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
35 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 0 of them goals. 3% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 74% from beyond forty.