New York Rangers

What the Quant Says

254 goals, 16th in the league, off the 28th-ranked expected-goal rate at even strength (2.337 per 60). Twelve places of daylight between what the skaters generated and what went in.

Chris Kreider scored 52 — 3rd in the league — and twenty-six of them came on the power play, more than any player in hockey. Leon Draisaitl was 2nd with 24 and nobody else had more than 16.

Artemi Panarin's 74 assists is 4th among all skaters, from an undrafted winger with the 4th-lowest slot share of 393 forwards.

Mika Zibanejad produced 81 points and took twelve penalty minutes in eighty-one games.

Adam Fox is 3rd in assists and 4th in points among the 343 defencemen in the league.

What the Scout Says

Chris Kreider took sixty-five per cent of his shots from the slot at a 16-foot median — the 9th-shortest of 393 forwards — and scored twenty-six power-play goals from that square. He also sprints at the 92nd percentile and covers the 8th-percentile ground: a straight line, at speed, to one place.

Artemi Panarin is the opposite chart. The 4th-lowest slot share of 393 forwards, the 15th-longest median shot distance, 74 assists, and a hit rate at the 5th percentile with a block rate at the 2nd. He passes, and does nothing else the file can measure.

Mika Zibanejad has the 4th-hardest shot of 365 forwards and took twelve penalty minutes in eighty-one games.

Julien Gauthier sprints more often than any of the 365 forwards the tracking covers and takes the shortest median shot of all 393 — thirteen feet. He scored three goals in forty-nine games. The file is loud about everything except the thing that would make him a player.

Kaapo Kakko went second overall in 2019 and Alexis Lafrenière first overall in 2020. They played 15:27 and 13:59 a night.

What the Quant Says

207 goals against, 2nd in the league, off the 19th-ranked expected-goals-against rate at even strength (2.655 per 60). Seventeen places, and all of it is the crease.

Every defenceman's ledger says the same thing. Jacob Trouba's ice gave back twelve fewer goals than the model asked; K'Andre Miller's thirteen fewer; Ryan Lindgren's nine fewer; Braden Schneider's eight fewer.

Adam Fox played 23:54 a night with the 3rd-most takeaways and the 3rd-fewest hits of 202 defencemen. He is 5-11 and 185 pounds.

K'Andre Miller is 6-5 and reads in the top decile of defencemen for top speed, sprints and ground covered — a combination almost no defenceman that size produces.

Patrik Nemeth took 39.2 per cent of the expected goals across 947 five-on-five minutes and has gone to Arizona.

What the Scout Says

Adam Fox is 5-11 and 185 pounds and the three defencemen who hit least often in the league are Quinn Hughes, Erik Karlsson and Fox. All three are small and all three are among the best in the world at the position, and nothing measurable in this book explains why.

What is measurable: the 3rd-most takeaways of 202 defencemen, the 96th-percentile slot share, the 3rd-shortest median shot distance of the 202, and 139 assists in 203 NHL games.

K'Andre Miller is 6-5 and reads at the 90th, 89th and 88th percentiles for top speed, sprints and ground covered. He also has the 97th-percentile takeaway rate and the 24th-percentile block rate — a defenceman who reaches rather than closes, at a size where that usually does not work.

Jacob Trouba draws penalties at the 95th percentile and takes them at the 91st, blocks at the 89th and hits at the 84th, and every skating measurement in his file is average.

Ryan Lindgren takes twenty-one per cent of his shots from the slot — the 96th percentile — and 2.79 per 60, the 7th.

What the Quant Says

2nd in the league at plus-23.4 goals saved above expectation, behind only Vancouver.

Igor Shesterkin posted .9346 across 53 games — the best of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five, and not close. Ilya Sorokin is 2nd at .9251. Ninety-five points of save percentage between first and second is a larger gap than the one between second and twelfth.

Three NHL seasons: .9316, .9159, .9346. Career .9281 on 3,033 shots. The middle figure is 987 shots long and 187 points below the last one, so this is a record with one enormous year at the end rather than a level.

Alexandar Georgiev took 32 games at .8978 and has gone to Colorado. Jaroslav Halak arrives at 37 with 15,714 career shots at .9157 — a real if small improvement on what he replaces.

What the Scout Says

Igor Shesterkin's .9346 is the largest single-season save percentage in the league and the gap to second is larger than the gap from second to twelfth.

He did it behind a club 24th in attempt share and 25th in chance share. 1,622 shots is not a small sample and neither is the 987 he faced the year before at .9159.

Those two seasons are 187 points apart. That is the caution: this is not a flat record like Juuse Saros's six years inside 131 points. It is one enormous year following an ordinary one.

A 110-point season resting on one number is fragile in a specific and measurable way, and the club's response was to replace an .8978 backup with a 37-year-old carrying 15,714 career shots at .9157.

Jaroslav Halak has finished between .9046 and .9257 in thirteen of his sixteen seasons. For twenty starts behind the best goaltender in hockey, that is a better answer than most clubs have.

What the Quant Says

5th in the league at 7.127 expected goals per 60 — over 4:14 a night, the smallest power-play workload in the league.

Chris Kreider scored twenty-six power-play goals, more than anyone in hockey, and forty-five per cent of his points came there. He did it on less man-advantage time than any club gave any of its players.

Mika Zibanejad took 2:59 a night and 35 per cent of his points on it; Artemi Panarin 2:59 and 39 per cent; Adam Fox 2:58 and 45 per cent.

Four men took essentially the same three minutes and between them accounted for the fifth-best unit in the league.

Alexis Lafrenière, the first pick of 2020, took 1:11.

What the Scout Says

Twenty-six power-play goals from one man, on the smallest power-play workload in the league. That sentence is the whole unit.

Chris Kreider took 2:58 a night and forty-five per cent of his points there. Adam Fox 2:58 and forty-five per cent, Artemi Panarin 2:59 and thirty-nine, Mika Zibanejad 2:59 and thirty-five.

Four men, all within a second of three minutes, and the 5th-best rate in hockey out of 4:14 a night.

What the unit does not have is a second wave. Alexis Lafrenière took 1:11 and six per cent of his points on it; Kaapo Kakko 1:14 and eleven per cent; Filip Chytil 1:04 and five per cent. Three first-round forwards, none of them near it.

What the Quant Says

9th in the league at 6.434 expected goals against per 60, over 4:58 a night.

Barclay Goodrow took 2:19 a night, the 97th percentile among forwards. Adam Fox killed 2:08, Ryan Lindgren 2:14, Jacob Trouba 2:05, Mika Zibanejad 1:50.

Jimmy Vesey and Ryan Carpenter arrive at the 93rd and 90th percentiles for short-handed ice among forwards, replacing Kevin Rooney, who had the lowest attempt share of the 393 qualified forwards in the league.

A top-ten kill and a top-five power play on a club 24th in attempt share is the shape of the whole season: the special teams and the goaltender did the work.

What the Scout Says

Barclay Goodrow killed 2:19 a night at the 97th percentile among forwards and posted the 32nd-worst chance share of 393. Both of those are true and the second is not obviously the cost of the first: 44.6 per cent of his end-zone starts came in the attacking end, which is the harder half of the league and nowhere near extreme enough to account for 43.2 per cent.

Jimmy Vesey arrives with the 2nd-most takeaways of 393 forwards — behind only Auston Matthews — the 93rd-percentile short-handed load, and a minus-24 that came entirely from New Jersey's crease.

Ryan Carpenter arrives having started 27.7 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end, the 11th-lowest of 652 skaters. He blocks at the 94th percentile and hits at the 88th.

Adam Fox took 2:08 short-handed and Ryan Lindgren 2:14, so the first pair does the work at both ends.