This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Will Borgen
Seattle Kraken Defense
Thirty-six games and a 54-foot median shot, from a fourth-round pick who has played fifty NHL games in three years.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | BUF | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 16:33 |
| 2020-21 | BUF | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0.0 | 16:16 |
| 2021-22 | SEA | 36 | 2 | 6 | 8 | +1 | 28 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 49 | 4.1 | 15:17 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 50 | 2 | 6 | 8 | -8 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 58 | 3.5 | 15:35 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 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
36 games, 2 goals and 6 assists at 15:17 a night, plus-1, twenty-eight penalty minutes, 49 shots. Ninety-second overall in 2015 by Buffalo — the fourth round — three seasons, 50 games, 8 points.
Thirty-six games is short of the forty this book requires before it will place a man in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.
The Finesse Game
Fifty-four feet is the median distance of his forty-nine shots and three per cent of them came from inside twenty. Seventy-nine per cent came from beyond forty. That is as pure a point shooter as this book records, and it comes off forty-nine attempts.
51.9 per cent of the expected goals across 514 five-on-five minutes, which is the best figure of any Seattle defenceman — and the smallest sample any of them is drawn from.
He started 53.7 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end, the 213th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts — the third-softest chair on this blue line, behind Justin Schultz at 58.8 and Vince Dunn at 56.2.
His ice went 14-14 against an expectation of 18.65-17.30 — four and a half goals short in front, three more against than the model asked, across half a season on a club whose goaltending rated 31st.
The Physical Game
Twenty-eight penalty minutes in thirty-six games at 6-3 and 199 pounds. That is nearly a minute a game from a third-pair defenceman, and across fifty career games he has thirty-two.
The Intangibles
22.1 mph top speed and 1.1 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game, both drawn from thirty-six games — a maximum scales with the number of shifts a man takes.
His shot is 96.1 mph, the 82nd percentile of the 568 skaters the tracking covers with forty games. That is the one measurement here that a half-season does not distort, and it is a genuine figure.
2.31 miles a game is the 30th percentile, which at fifteen minutes a night is the shift length.
He is 25 and has fifty NHL games across three calendar years after leaving the organisation that drafted him. The shot speed, the shot chart and the penalty minutes are the three things the record establishes. Five hundred and fourteen minutes is not a season and this club has four defencemen ahead of him.
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 514 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.9%
- 70th pct
- Shot attempts
- 52%
- 72nd 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: 14 for, 14 against. Expected: 18.6 and 17.3.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 17 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 61 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, 2021-22 · 36 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 71st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.14 a game
- Distance
- 2.31 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 96.1 mph
- 77th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.4
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
2021-22 · 514 minutes at five-on-five
- Carson Soucy22%
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, 2021-22
- The club
- SEA took 49.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.9% — 2.6 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 514 minutes at five-on-five — 19th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jared McCann | 56.7% | 49.8% | 49.9% |
| Ryan Donato | 46.2% | 53.8% | 49.1% |
| Jordan Eberle | 53.4% | 51.3% | 49.3% |
56.7% together, 49.8% for him apart and 49.9% for McCann 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
63 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 62 feet. 3% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 79% from beyond forty.