Vladimir Tarasenko

33 points at 33 and a minus-13, and the cheapest possible attempt to buy a scorer.

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	OTT/FLA	76	23	32	55	+13	12	3	0	5	155	14.8	15:44
2024-25	DET	80	11	22	33	-13	6	1	0	1	133	8.3	14:47
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	831	304	358	662	+61	203	70	1	51	2412	12.6	17:02

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

11 goals and 22 assists in 80 games for 33 points, minus-13, on 14:47 a night with Detroit.

133 shots and 11 goals at 8.3 per cent, which is roughly half his career rate. 33 points is the lowest full-season total of his career by 15.

The Finesse Game

The shot was one of the best in the league for a decade and it has not entirely gone — the release is still heavy and it still gets away quickly from the circle.

What has gone is everything that got him to the circle. 133 shots in 80 games is a low volume and 22 assists says he is not compensating with playmaking. He needs the puck delivered into space and there are fewer and fewer players willing to do it for him.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 219, and he does not use it. He avoids the wall, does not forecheck, and does not go to the net front.

6 penalty minutes over 80 games is the most telling number in his record: he is not involved in anything.

The Intangibles

Two Cups, four 30-goal seasons, a shoulder that required surgery more than once, and four organisations in three years.

At 34 on a cheap short deal, Minnesota is buying the possibility that a 30-goal shot beside Kaprizov and Boldy produces more than it did beside nobody. That is a reasonable thing to buy at the price and it is the last version of it anybody will try.

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
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.

disciplined· stays out of the box
0.07 penalty minutes a game over 80, 1st percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
durable· was available
80 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
net-fronthe lacks it· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He avoids the wall, does not forecheck, and does not go to the net front.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He avoids the wall, does not forecheck, and does not go to the net front.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He avoids the wall, does not forecheck, and does not go to the net front.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“133 shots in 80 games is a low volume and 22 assists says he is not compensating with playmaking.”
nastyhe lacks it· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“6 penalty minutes over 80 games is the most telling number in his record: he is not involved in anything.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 986 minutes

Expected goals: 47.4%; 30th pct
Shot attempts: 45%; 12th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 38 for, 37 against. Expected: 36.3 and 40.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

42nd

Numbers

30th

The two rank him within 12 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 — 71 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 · 80 games

Top speed: 21.8 mph; 28th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.94 a game
Distance: 2.35 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.3 mph; 34th 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 with DET · 986 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, 2024-25

The club: DET took 48.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.4% — 0.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 986 minutes at five-on-five — 59th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
J.T. Compher	50.0%	45.7%	39.2%
Jonatan Berggren	48.1%	46.9%	42.6%
Ben Chiarot	42.9%	49.5%	45.4%

50.0% together, 45.7% for him apart and 39.2% for Compher 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

192 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 22 feet. 27% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.