This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Urho Vaakanainen

14 assists in 51 games at 16:25, seven seasons after being drafted 18th overall, and finally a regular.

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	ANA	23	0	2	2	-16	0	0	0	0	27	0.0	16:27
2023-24	ANA	68	1	13	14	0	26	0	0	0	67	1.5	17:29
2024-25	ANA/NYR	51	2	14	16	+8	18	0	0	0	42	4.8	16:25
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	187	3	37	40	-15	56	0	0	0	182	1.7	17:19

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

2 goals and 14 assists in 51 games between Anaheim and New York — 16 points, plus-8, at 16:25 a night on 18 penalty minutes.

46.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 15th percentile, across 737 minutes. 14 assists in 51 games is comfortably the best rate of his career, which says less about a breakout than about a man who had never been given a full year of games.

The Finesse Game

The skating is clean and the puck moves quickly off his stick under pressure, which is the reason he keeps being given third-pair minutes by clubs that have run out of other options.

There is no shot. 79 per cent of his attempts came from beyond 40 feet, 7 per cent from inside 20, and 3 goals in 187 career games is the record. He is a distributor at the line and nothing else, and 14 assists on a bad chance share is the most that shape produces.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 202, and neither heavy nor soft. He will take the body and he will go to the paint, and he does not move a grown winger out of it.

18 penalty minutes in 51 games is a quiet number for a defenceman on a third pair. The defending is positional and it holds up against depth lines; against a first line it does not.

The Intangibles

The 18th pick in 2017, seven years and four organisations later he had played 187 games, and last season was the first in which he was simply in the lineup.

He is 26 and this is the useful version of him: a fourth or fifth defenceman who can be trusted for sixteen minutes and does not have to be hidden. That is a long way from where the draft position pointed and it is a genuine NHL career.

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.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
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.

hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
38% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 7th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“The skating is clean and the puck moves quickly off his stick under pressure, which is the reason he keeps being given third-pair minutes by clubs that have run out of other options.”
punishingpresent and ordinary· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“6-2 and 202, and neither heavy nor soft.”
clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He will take the body and he will go to the paint, and he does not move a grown winger out of it.”
defensively-responsiblepresent and ordinary· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“The defending is positional and it holds up against depth lines; against a first line it does not.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 737 minutes

Expected goals: 46.3%; 22nd pct
Shot attempts: 46.4%; 21st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 29 for, 23 against. Expected: 26.0 and 30.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

3rd

Numbers

22nd

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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 60 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, 2024-25 · 51 games

Top speed: 22.0 mph; 61st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.29 a game
Distance: 2.25 miles a game
Hardest shot: 85.6 mph; 21st 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

2024-25 · 673 minutes at five-on-five

Braden Schneider71%

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, 2024-25

The club: NYR took 47.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.3% — 1.4 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 737 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Braden Schneider	47.8%	43.6%	45.5%
Artemi Panarin	47.5%	45.9%	51.3%
Vincent Trocheck	48.4%	45.6%	48.4%

47.8% together, 43.6% for him apart and 45.5% for Schneider apart. He was worse away from Schneider, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Schneider did.

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

68 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 42 feet. 7% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 79% from beyond forty.