Uvis Balinskis

Last Season

Five goals and 10 assists in 54 games — 15 points, minus-13, at 16:22 a night.

The Finesse Game

Modest. Eighty-three unblocked attempts from a median of 47 feet, four per cent inside twenty, five goals. Three of them came on the power play, which for a third-pair defenceman is a curiosity rather than a skill.

Thirty-six points in 156 career games. He moves the puck adequately and does not create.

The Physical Game

Six foot even, 196, and he defends without imposing. Thirty penalty minutes in 54 games. He is not clearing a crease against a heavy winger, and on the third pair that is exposed more often than it should be.

The Intangibles

Forty-eight per cent of the expected goals, 36th percentile — the weakest of Florida’s regular defencemen, and nowhere near bad enough to explain what happened.

The chances while he was on the ice ran 29.6 to 32.1 against, a deficit of two and a half goals. The actual goals went 27 for and 47 against.

Twenty goals of gap in 772 minutes. Mikkola’s page carries the same story twenty-five goals deep. This is what the league’s worst goaltending does to the men in front of it, and it is why the minus column on this roster should be ignored almost entirely.

He is 30, undrafted, and a serviceable third-pair defenceman being read as a disaster.