Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2024-25 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2025-26 report →

91

Vladimir Tarasenko

Detroit Red Wings Right Wing

Two hundred and ninety-three goals, 69 power-play goals, and a second Stanley Cup at 32 in a fourth-line role.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2012-13STL3881119+1103017510.713:25
2013-14STL64212243+201650313615.415:10
2014-15STL77373673+273180626414.017:37
2015-16STL80403474+737120729213.718:38
2016-17STL82393675-11290828613.618:28
2017-18STL80333366+151760530610.819:03
2018-19STL76333568+822120527512.018:24
2019-20STL103710-201002611.516:11
2020-21STL2441014-70200656.217:25
2021-22STL75344882+73250923014.816:55
2022-23STL/NYR69183250-14831116910.716:48
2023-24OTT/FLA76233255+131230515514.815:44
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—751293336629+7419769150227912.917:16

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

Seventy-six games in Florida, 23 goals and 32 assists for 55 points with 3 on the power play, 15:44 a night and plus-13. He converted 14.84 per cent of 155 shots against a career 12.86 across 2,279.

He took 48.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 993 minutes, the 40th percentile, and his ice went 55-45 against an expectation of 43.84-46.85. Fifty-five points at fifteen minutes a night on the club that won everything is the season of a man being used correctly.

The Finesse Game

The shot is still the thing. He shoots from a median of 29 feet with 31 per cent from inside 20 and the release off the rush is heavy and disguised, and 293 goals in 751 games at 12.86 per cent is what it has produced.

Sixty-nine career power-play goals from the left circle. Three hundred and thirty-six career assists; he holds the puck below the goal line at 219 pounds and finds the seam late.

The skating went years ago and it is no longer a rush game. Everything now is arriving in the right place and shooting from it.

The Physical Game

He is 6-1 and 219 and protects the puck below the goal line, but he does not forecheck hard and does not finish checks. Twelve penalty minutes in 76 games is one of the lowest rates on this roster.

He wins the wall by weight rather than by effort, and against a defenceman who is willing he loses it.

The Intangibles

The 16th pick in 2010 out of Yaroslavl, twelve seasons, 629 points in 751 games and two Stanley Cups — one in St Louis and one in Florida at 32 in a role three lines below where he started.

Detroit has signed a 32-year-old with 293 career goals to shoot from the left circle on a power play ranked tenth. That is a sensible use of what is left.

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

    6 of his 23 goals late or in overtime, 99th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it

  • disciplined· stays out of the box

    0.16 penalty minutes a game over 76, 9th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it

  • wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line

    “He wins the wall by weight rather than by effort, and against a defenceman who is willing he loses it.”

  • forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck

    “He is 6-1 and 219 and protects the puck below the goal line, but he does not forecheck hard and does not finish checks.”

  • playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “Three hundred and thirty-six career assists; he holds the puck below the goal line at 219 pounds and finds the seam late.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 993 minutes

Expected goals
48.3%
40th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
49.7%
53rd pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 55 for, 45 against. Expected: 43.8 and 46.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
35th
Numbers
40th

The two rank him within 5 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 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, 2023-24 · 76 games

Top speed
22.4 mph
61st pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.1

Bursts over 20 mph
0.96 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.41 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
85.7 mph
43rd pct

one shot; the league's average best is 84.5

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

2023-24 with OTT · 768 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, 2023-24

The club
FLA took 53.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.3% — 5.4 below the club he did it on.
The role
993 minutes at five-on-five — 56th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Jakob Chychrun53.5%45.6%45.7%
Tim Stützle49.9%47.7%50.9%
Jake Sanderson46.9%48.8%54.6%

53.5% together, 45.6% for him apart and 45.7% for Chychrun 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

214 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 23 of them goals. His median goal came from 24 feet. 31% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.