This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Zach Whitecloud
Vegas Golden Knights Defense
Undrafted, a career plus-46 in 186 games, and the fourteenth percentile of zone starts.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | VGK | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | 16:42 |
| 2019-20 | VGK | 16 | 0 | 1 | 1 | +3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0.0 | 14:19 |
| 2020-21 | VGK | 51 | 2 | 10 | 12 | +9 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 54 | 3.7 | 17:49 |
| 2021-22 | VGK | 59 | 8 | 11 | 19 | +21 | 20 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 94 | 8.5 | 18:48 |
| 2022-23 | VGK | 59 | 5 | 7 | 12 | +10 | 41 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 64 | 7.8 | 17:07 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 186 | 15 | 29 | 44 | +46 | 89 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 221 | 6.8 | 17:36 |
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
5 goals and 7 assists in 59 games — 12 points — at 17:07 a night. Plus-10, 64 shots at 7.8 per cent, 41 penalty minutes.
46.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 23rd percentile, across 915 minutes, with his ice at 40-33 against an expectation of 33.88-39.05 — six more goals scored than the chances called for and six fewer allowed, which is a twelve-goal swing and the whole of the plus-10.
He started 40.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 14th percentile: 203 attacking draws against 295 defensive ones. The hardest deployment of any defenceman on this roster.
So the 23rd percentile needs its context, and the context is most of it.
The Finesse Game
64 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 73 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 9 per cent from inside twenty.
Beyond forty feet: 46 shots on goal and one goal — 2.17 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 11 shots and two goals. Inside twenty: seven shots and two goals.
88 tracked attempts in 59 games, 56 of them wrist shots and 14 slap. 91.8 mph at the 57th percentile — the softest shot on this blue line.
15 goals in 186 career games at 6.8 per cent, which is a respectable rate for a defenceman who takes eighty-eight shots a season.
There is no offensive case here and it is not what he is for.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 210 pounds, with 41 penalty minutes in 59 games and 89 in 186 career games.
Top speed 21.6 mph at the 19th percentile, 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 16th, 2.34 miles a game at the 34th. Slow on every measure, which on this particular blue line makes him about average.
He is punishing, and the way he defends a rush is to take the man rather than the puck.
He blocks shots and takes them off the body without complaint, which is the fourteenth-percentile deployment written as a description rather than a number.
The feet are the limit and the reason a right-handed defenceman with a career plus-46 is on a third pair.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, five seasons, 186 games, 44 points, all of them here, and a Stanley Cup.
15 goals and 29 assists, and a plus-46 in 186 games, which is a rate almost nothing in the rest of the file predicts.
He is twenty-six, a right-handed undrafted defenceman from Manitoba who has played nowhere else.
An undrafted defenceman taking the hardest starts on a Stanley Cup winner is the kind of file this book was revived to write down. The 23rd-percentile chance share is real and so is the deployment that produced it, and a reader who takes only one of those away has taken the wrong one.
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.
- 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.
“He is punishing, and the way he defends a rush is to take the man rather than the puck.”
“He blocks shots and takes them off the body without complaint, which is the fourteenth-percentile deployment written as a description rather than a number.”
“An undrafted defenceman taking the hardest starts on a Stanley Cup winner is the kind of file this book was revived to write down.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 915 minutes
- Expected goals
- 46.5%
- 30th pct
- Shot attempts
- 44.6%
- 15th 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: 40 for, 33 against. Expected: 33.9 and 39.0.
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 — 69 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 · 59 games
- Top speed
- 21.6 mph
- 52nd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.36 a game
- Distance
- 2.34 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 91.8 mph
- 49th 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 90.0
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 · 915 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
- VGK took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.5% — 4.5 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 915 minutes at five-on-five — 49th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nicolas Hague | 47.9% | 43.5% | 50.3% |
| Phil Kessel | 41.0% | 48.6% | 51.3% |
| William Karlsson | 50.2% | 45.1% | 55.2% |
47.9% together, 43.5% for him apart and 50.3% for Hague apart. He was worse away from Hague, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Hague did.
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
88 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 73% from beyond forty.