This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Vincent Trocheck

Three hundred and thirty-one attacking-zone starts and 331 defensive — the most exactly balanced deployment in this book.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2013-14	FLA	20	5	3	8	-11	6	1	1	0	38	13.2	18:53
2014-15	FLA	50	7	15	22	+9	24	1	0	0	89	7.9	14:00
2015-16	FLA	76	25	28	53	+15	44	4	1	4	174	14.4	17:46
2016-17	FLA	82	23	31	54	-13	43	2	0	2	230	10.0	20:50
2017-18	FLA	82	31	44	75	-9	54	13	3	5	287	10.8	21:22
2018-19	FLA	55	10	24	34	-9	54	3	1	1	158	6.3	19:40
2019-20	FLA/CAR	62	11	27	38	-8	49	1	1	2	141	7.8	16:44
2020-21	CAR	47	17	26	43	-3	20	7	0	2	123	13.8	18:14
2021-22	CAR	81	21	30	51	+21	78	6	0	3	168	12.5	17:52
2022-23	NYR	82	22	42	64	+3	58	9	0	3	225	9.8	19:19
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	637	172	270	442	-5	430	47	7	22	1633	10.5	18:40

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

22 goals and 42 assists in 82 games — 64 points — at 19:19 a night. Plus-3, 225 shots at 9.8 per cent, nine on the power play, 58 penalty minutes.

51.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 63rd percentile, with his ice at 55-50 against an expectation of 54.08-50.75 across 1,234 minutes — the goals landed on the chances almost exactly.

And the deployment, which is a curiosity: 331 attacking-zone draws and 331 defensive. Exactly even, to the faceoff. Fifty per cent, the 46th percentile.

Ten seasons, 637 games, 442 points.

The Finesse Game

225 shots at a median of 20 feet, half of them from inside twenty, and twenty-two goals.

Inside twenty: 113 shots on goal and 14 goals — 12.39 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 83 shots and 6 goals, 7.23 per cent, against 11.05.

So he is a below-average finisher from both ranges taking a large number of shots from the right places, and 9.8 per cent overall is the arithmetic of it. The 22 goals are volume.

148 wrist shots and 58 tip-ins out of 333 tracked attempts, with 55 snap and 35 backhands. That is a broad and busy chart: he is in the traffic, redirecting, working below the goal line.

270 career assists against 172 goals. The playmaking is the better half and always has been.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 187, with 58 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 69th percentile; 2.0 bursts a game, the 86th; 3.17 miles a game, the 89th.

High mileage and frequent sprints from a small centre of thirty, which is what nineteen minutes a night of matchup hockey costs.

He forechecks hard, wins pucks below the goal line against bigger men, and gives up nothing physically for his size. The 430 career penalty minutes are the record of a player who does not back out of anything.

An exactly even zone start on a club whose other centres were given the ends of the rink says the coaching staff considers him the one it does not have to think about.

The Intangibles

Sixty-fourth overall in 2011 to Florida, six seasons there, three in Carolina, and a first year here at thirty.

172 goals and 270 assists in 637 games, with the 75-point season in 2017-18 the high-water mark.

He is thirty on a long contract, and the tracking says the skating is holding. The file’s honest limit is the finishing: a centre who shoots 225 times from inside forty feet and converts below the league rate at both distances is not going to score more than he did.

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

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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
15:03 a game at five-on-five, 93rd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks hard, wins pucks below the goal line against bigger men, and gives up nothing physically for his size.”
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“That is a broad and busy chart: he is in the traffic, redirecting, working below the goal line.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“270 career assists against 172 goals. The playmaking is the better half and always has been.”
defensively-responsiblea strength· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“An exactly even zone start on a club whose other centres were given the ends of the rink says the coaching staff considers him the one it does not have to think about.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,234 minutes

Expected goals: 51.6%; 64th pct
Shot attempts: 52.6%; 76th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 55 for, 50 against. Expected: 54.1 and 50.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

90th

Numbers

64th

The report ranks him 26 points above where the numbers do. 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 77 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, 2022-23 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 74th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.04 a game
Distance: 3.17 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.5 mph; 81st 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

2022-23 · 1234 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, 2022-23

The club: NYR took 49.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.6% — 2.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,234 minutes at five-on-five — 85th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Artemi Panarin	53.1%	49.2%	48.0%
Jacob Trouba	52.2%	51.1%	47.1%
K'Andre Miller	52.4%	51.1%	48.2%

53.1% together, 49.2% for him apart and 48.0% for Panarin 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

328 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 21 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet.