This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Yanni Gourde
Seattle Kraken Center
Five-foot-nine, undrafted, 76 penalty minutes, and nine different kinds of shot.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | TBL | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | +1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 7:19 |
| 2016-17 | TBL | 20 | 6 | 2 | 8 | -1 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 30 | 20.0 | 15:22 |
| 2017-18 | TBL | 82 | 25 | 39 | 64 | +34 | 50 | 7 | 1 | 5 | 136 | 18.4 | 16:09 |
| 2018-19 | TBL | 80 | 22 | 26 | 48 | +9 | 66 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 130 | 16.9 | 15:50 |
| 2019-20 | TBL | 70 | 10 | 20 | 30 | -5 | 49 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 110 | 9.1 | 14:04 |
| 2020-21 | TBL | 56 | 17 | 19 | 36 | +10 | 44 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 118 | 14.4 | 17:04 |
| 2021-22 | SEA | 74 | 21 | 27 | 48 | -13 | 45 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 127 | 16.5 | 18:29 |
| 2022-23 | SEA | 81 | 14 | 34 | 48 | +23 | 76 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 141 | 9.9 | 17:08 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 465 | 115 | 168 | 283 | +58 | 340 | 21 | 7 | 25 | 792 | 14.5 | 16:22 |
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
14 goals and 34 assists in 81 games — 48 points — at 17:08 a night. Plus-23, 141 shots at 9.9 per cent, three on the power play, one shorthanded, two game-winners, 76 penalty minutes.
53.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,156 minutes, the 74th percentile, with his ice at 59-42 against an expectation of 48.72-42.49 — ten goals more than the chances at the good end and exactly on the number at the other.
He started 51.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 57th percentile, which on this roster is the neutral assignment and reflects a third-line centre used against everybody.
The Finesse Game
141 shots at a median of 24 feet.
Inside twenty feet: 49 shots on goal and eight goals — 16.33 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 53 shots and five goals, 9.43 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 34 shots and one goal.
Slightly under the rate everywhere, on a career 14.5 per cent shooting percentage that has fallen to 9.9. At thirty-one that is worth watching rather than concluding from.
The shot mix is the most varied in this book. Of his 200 tracked attempts, 72 are wrist shots — 36 per cent, against a median forward’s 51.9 — and the rest is 32 slap, 26 snap, 26 backhand, 24 tip-in, 14 deflected, three bats, two pokes and a wrap-around. Nine distinct kinds of shot in one season.
That is not an aesthetic observation. A 5-9 centre who cannot shoot through a defenceman scores by putting the puck on net from whatever position he happens to be in, and the distribution is the record of it.
92.6 mph at the 63rd percentile, which is a hard shot for his size and is used least often of any of these.
The Physical Game
5-9 and 173 pounds, with 76 penalty minutes in 81 games — the highest total on this roster — and 340 in 465 career games.
Top speed 22.2 mph at the 44th percentile, 1.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 68th, 2.86 miles a game at the 72nd. He covers a great deal of ground for a man his size at seventeen minutes a night.
He is an agitator and has built a career on it. At 173 pounds the only way to play the way he plays is to be first to the puck and unpleasant when he gets there, and the penalty record is the cost of a method that also produces the plus-23.
He forechecks into contact against defencemen sixty pounds heavier and does not come off second best often enough for anybody to stop him doing it.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, eight seasons, 465 games, 283 points across Tampa Bay and Seattle, and two Stanley Cups.
115 goals and 168 assists from a 5-9 forward who was not drafted and did not hold an NHL job until he was twenty-five.
He is thirty-one. The two 48-point seasons in Seattle bracket a 64-point year in Tampa in 2017-18, and the shape of the career is a third-line centre who is better than his size and his draft position ever suggested.
What a club buys is 81 games, 17 minutes, the 74th percentile of chance share, and 76 penalty minutes that are mostly other people’s fault.
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
81 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“115 goals and 168 assists from a 5-9 forward who was not drafted and did not hold an NHL job until he was twenty-five.”
“He is an agitator and has built a career on it.”
“He forechecks into contact against defencemen sixty pounds heavier and does not come off second best often enough for anybody to stop him doing it.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,156 minutes
- Expected goals
- 53.4%
- 77th pct
- Shot attempts
- 54.9%
- 90th 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: 59 for, 42 against. Expected: 48.7 and 42.5.
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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 79 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 · 81 games
- Top speed
- 22.2 mph
- 51st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.35 a game
- Distance
- 2.86 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 92.6 mph
- 82nd 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 · 1156 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
- SEA took 52.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.4% — 1.1 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 1,156 minutes at five-on-five — 80th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oliver Bjorkstrand | 50.8% | 56.3% | 51.7% |
| Eeli Tolvanen | 53.0% | 53.7% | 47.1% |
| Adam Larsson | 54.9% | 52.4% | 53.6% |
50.8% together, 56.3% for him apart and 51.7% for Bjorkstrand apart. He was better away from Bjorkstrand, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Bjorkstrand.
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
195 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 14 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 44% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.