This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →
Vladimir Tarasenko
Ottawa Senators Right Wing
Fourteen per cent from twenty to forty feet, and the worst chance share of any forward on this roster.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-13 | STL | 38 | 8 | 11 | 19 | +1 | 10 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 75 | 10.7 | 13:25 |
| 2013-14 | STL | 64 | 21 | 22 | 43 | +20 | 16 | 5 | 0 | 3 | 136 | 15.4 | 15:10 |
| 2014-15 | STL | 77 | 37 | 36 | 73 | +27 | 31 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 264 | 14.0 | 17:37 |
| 2015-16 | STL | 80 | 40 | 34 | 74 | +7 | 37 | 12 | 0 | 7 | 292 | 13.7 | 18:38 |
| 2016-17 | STL | 82 | 39 | 36 | 75 | -1 | 12 | 9 | 0 | 8 | 286 | 13.6 | 18:28 |
| 2017-18 | STL | 80 | 33 | 33 | 66 | +15 | 17 | 6 | 0 | 5 | 306 | 10.8 | 19:03 |
| 2018-19 | STL | 76 | 33 | 35 | 68 | +8 | 22 | 12 | 0 | 5 | 275 | 12.0 | 18:24 |
| 2019-20 | STL | 10 | 3 | 7 | 10 | -2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 26 | 11.5 | 16:11 |
| 2020-21 | STL | 24 | 4 | 10 | 14 | -7 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 65 | 6.2 | 17:25 |
| 2021-22 | STL | 75 | 34 | 48 | 82 | +7 | 32 | 5 | 0 | 9 | 230 | 14.8 | 16:55 |
| 2022-23 | STL/NYR | 69 | 18 | 32 | 50 | -14 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 169 | 10.7 | 16:48 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 675 | 270 | 304 | 574 | +61 | 185 | 66 | 1 | 45 | 2124 | 12.7 | 17:26 |
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
18 goals and 32 assists in 69 games — 50 points — split between St Louis and the Rangers, at 16:48 a night. Minus-14, 169 shots at 10.7 per cent, one shorthanded goal, eight penalty minutes.
45.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 25th percentile — the lowest of any forward on this roster who played nine hundred five-on-five minutes, with his ice at 46-45 against an expectation of 38.6-45.7 across 950 minutes.
He started 53 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 63rd percentile.
Eleven seasons, and a career built almost entirely in one place.
The Finesse Game
169 shots at a median of 30 feet, and eighteen goals.
From twenty to forty feet: 90 shots on goal and 13 goals — 14.44 per cent, against a league forward rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 60 shots and 7 goals, 11.67 per cent, well below the league’s 17.71. Beyond forty: 20 shots and none.
So the shooting has moved outward: he is now a mid-range scorer who converts below the league from the crease, which is the opposite of the shape he had at his peak.
137 wrist shots out of 234 tracked attempts, with 16 slap. 88.1 mph at the 31st percentile, which for a man whose reputation is the shot is a genuinely surprising reading and is consistent with sixteen slap shots.
32 assists in sixty-nine games is a career-best rate, which is what happens when a shooter starts giving the puck away instead.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 219, with eight penalty minutes in sixty-nine games.
Top speed 22.5 mph, the 62nd percentile; 1.0 bursts a game, the 53rd; 2.60 miles a game, the 53rd. The middle of the league in every reading, at thirty-one.
At 219 pounds he protects the puck below the goal line, which is the physical skill he has always had.
What he does not do is forecheck, backcheck or finish a check, and eight penalty minutes across a season is the arithmetic of a man who is never in a scrum. The 25th-percentile chance share is what it costs.
Offensive-zone ice time 39.9 per cent, the 20th percentile, which is a second measurement of a shift that spends its time in the wrong end.
The Intangibles
Sixteenth overall in 2010, ten seasons in St Louis, and then the Rangers.
The five straight seasons of thirty goals or better between 2014 and 2019 are the player Ottawa is buying the memory of, and the shoulder that ended two of the seasons after them is the reason he was available.
He is thirty-one on a club whose problem was finishing — thirtieth in the league — and eighteen goals in sixty-nine games is a modest answer to it. What the club is betting is that a 45.8 per cent chance share was the Rangers’ fourth line rather than 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.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- 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.
- clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live
4 of his 18 goals late or in overtime, 98th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
- disciplined· stays out of the box
0.12 penalty minutes a game over 69, 7th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
“At 219 pounds he protects the puck below the goal line, which is the physical skill he has always had.”
“What he does not do is forecheck, backcheck or finish a check, and eight penalty minutes across a season is the arithmetic of a man who is never in a scrum.”
“32 assists in sixty-nine games is a career-best rate, which is what happens when a shooter starts giving the puck away instead.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 950 minutes
- Expected goals
- 45.8%
- 26th pct
- Shot attempts
- 44.7%
- 16th 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: 46 for, 45 against. Expected: 38.6 and 45.7.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 36 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 — 68 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 · 69 games
- Top speed
- 22.5 mph
- 67th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.97 a game
- Distance
- 2.60 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.1 mph
- 55th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 with STL · 524 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 45.8% — 3.4 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 950 minutes at five-on-five — 53rd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Robert Thomas | 50.0% | 43.5% | 44.2% |
| Artemi Panarin | 47.0% | 45.3% | 52.4% |
| Mika Zibanejad | 40.9% | 47.4% | 51.4% |
50.0% together, 43.5% for him apart and 44.2% for Thomas 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
236 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 20 of them goals. His median goal came from 23 feet. 35% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 11% from beyond forty.