2025 T25U25: Nick Robertson is #5

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What we're doing here with this T25 exercise is trying to know someone who is at least partly unknowable. Sometimes this prospect ranking business gets turned into a hot take extravaganza – don't think, just state an opinion with confidence and run with it. That is the essence of the advice about sports writing from some of the best in the business. Have an opinion, strongly worded, don't back down.

But this ain't TSN radio or a column in the Sun.

What we're doing is exploring the tension between the knowable and the probability of things to come in an uncertain future. I don't think that's the mission statement of Overdrive (even if they engage in that endeavour quite often).

When we get someone very wrong – as revealed by time – or when we disagree a lot, it's tempting to lay that at the door of that uncertain future. Once time has passed and [insert name here of that guy you were hot for] turns out to be a second-line winger in the SHL or an AHL lifer, you can claim it was something that went wrong in development. Or he just didn't want it enough. Or no one gave him a chance. But there is a good chance we are often wrong about what is knowable.

Sometimes the facts are thin. Gimme five true things about Timofei Obvintsev, I'll wait. Sometimes we interpret the facts badly or are imputing meaning into things that are ephemeral visions of possibilities, probabilities, and should make us feel less sure, not more. Like, you know, points.

Nicholas Robertson	Vitals
Age as of July 1	23.8
Position	W
Height	5'9"
Weight (lbs)	178
Shoots	L
Draft Year	2019
Draft Number	53

Sometimes we're just paying way too much attention to height. The terribly important height and weight above are from the Maple Leafs roster, so valid as of last training camp.

The Player

The Knowable (not that we necessary know it)

Nick Robertson is almost exactly one year younger than Semyon Der-Arguchintsev, a player we all feel we understand fully. We used to think we knew them both when they teamed up on all those goals in the OHL.

Robertson has 156 NHL regular season games played, five less than Matt Knies. And here's the way that should be expressed: Knies has 2,578 minutes played and Robertson 1,788.

Knies gets a few more assists relative to his goals than Robertson does, which means not a hell of a lot, and is more about who they play with since neither one of them are playmakers of note. Knies scores right at expected, and Robertson over it. (What the hell does that mean? It means that for every single Expected Goal [using Evolving Hockey's model] that Knies creates with his shots, he scores one goal. Robertson scores 1.33.)

For you lovers of olde timey stats, Knies has a higher career shooting percentage at 16 than Robertson at 12. So you'll stop looking at that now and taking it as a measure of finishing skill? Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Knies is leaving now, because he's given us all the context he's able too. We'll see him again in a few days, don't worry.

The Interpretation

Who I am today is not who I will be tomorrow. The average of who I was all last week is also not who I will be tomorrow. Somewhere on the continuum of all my days is a day much like tomorrow will be. I haven't got a clue which, but it won't be my best, though, because I'm way too fucking old to hit that level again.

Robertson can't be sure, as he skates somewhere getting ready for yet another training camp fight to prove himself, what his season will be. Somewhere on his continuum. He, unlike me, gets to tell himself in a firm and certain voice, that it will be the best year of his life, and then he can run with it. It's possible at 24 to be better than you were at 23. Not necessarily because you yourself are any different, but because all of the dice rolls around you can come up good.

Facts and Supposition, Experience and Outright Speculation

I've looked at a lot of stats and shot plots for a lot of players over a lot of years. And I've noticed a few things. Players almost never change how they shoot. They shoot from the places they shoot from in the volume they shoot, and the only way that changes much is if they are really young or move from a very bad team with no offensive zone time to a team with more. And this needs to be dramatic because – for example – Auston Matthews is Auston Matthews no matter the Leafs team stats. He's in the zone because he puts himself there. For mere mortals, they might be more like the boat that floats on a rising tide. But that tide has to really turn for it to be noticeable.

This is who Nick Robertson is with the puck on his stick:

One thing you can just take my word for is that that is a LOT of shots for someone playing his minutes. The other thing I'll give you some context for is that most of that shooting is junk. And to avoid too many weird charts and graphs and Corsis and shit, I picked something olde timey in its DNA, just juiced up with a few 20-year-old ideas:

NHL Edge uses Shots on Goal, so glance up and look at all the grey coloured shots and realize they aren't considered at all here.

To sum up, Robertson is above league average in number of SOG on volume of shooting, but the only places he actually shoots above average numbers from is from the weeds out by the blueline and that one spot on the left side.

Some more facts: He is a negative creator of offence (Hockey Viz model). What that means is that adjusted for the strength of his teammates, his opposition and other small factors like zone starts, there is less offence because he is there on the ice than there would be if those same linemates were with an average player. He neither adds nor subtracts defensively, and I will pause the facts to argue against a common misconception:

Yeah, you know, Nick is short for an NHLer, and the stereotype is therefore that he is "bad defensively". Meanwhile he's a winger who any coach with a pulse recognizes has one key skill, so no one is asking him to defend. There is just no concern or expectation about his defending. He's the fastest player on the team, get him the puck and ain't no one catching him, that's his impact on where the puck is.

But the Goals, Though

Forget them, and ignore anyone telling you with confidence they know what his shooting percentage will be next year. Expected Goals are what matters, and he produces enough to be a third liner. Wait.

The trouble is, he does that as the guy shooting almost all the shots on his shifts. But he shoots from locations that make him an okay third liner. Wait.

Also, this shot of his is a genuine skill, but it's a bit tough to guess if the amount he shoots over expected is going to stay steady, decline or rise. This is the unknowable part of the story. And it's more likely it declines because he's out at the bleeding edge of goals over expected given how he shoots. Very, very few forwards have pulled off that rate of finishing on such poor quality shooting over a career of lots more than 1,700 minutes. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just more likely to go down than up. More likely isn't will, and less likely isn't will not, but for many people, the way they are used to processing the world, it might as well be, so they may state firmly one or the other and run with it. I'm not going to try to catch them.

Wait's over.

Scoring on junk shooting is his only skill, though. This is not exaggeration. Yes he's fast, and he uses that in part to whip past defending players and get clean looks. But weirdly he doesn't draw penalties. He takes enough to wipe out what he draws, and that one-trick style of play makes him a fourth liner who needs weak competition to pull the trick successfully. And he makes his line worse offensively overall.

All he does is score. Yup. That is absolutely all he does.

His closest comparator really is Eeli Tolvanen, who is on team number two at 26, with a lot of AHL time, a bigger salary, and some expectations he never met because he was a "first-rounder". Tolvanen, claimed on waivers and then overpaid by Seattle, is a touch better. He's got less of a negative impact offensively and he just barely manages to play against the full spectrum of competition. He's less awkward to put into the lineup, but only just.

Robertson is awkward because, if the fourth line's job is to get the puck in the zone and get off for someone better, he actively works against that. If he's on a third line that wants to play a hard forecheck and wear down the defence, he's in the zone way too fast and has either shot the puck on goal or given it away before the beef shows up. He's not a top six option because he's the only guy with the puck and he's shot the puck or turned it over and no cycle ever happens to generate high-percentage chances.

The Unknowable Future

What does life hold at 24? In the NHL two things are true – you're not likely to get appreciably better (although that's not the same thing as saying your results will be identical), and it's the last season a very large number of borderline NHLers ever get in a game. Age 25 is the big exit year from the top echelon of pro hockey. You're either in or you're not, and that's when it gets decided.

Robertson is not the master of his fate. He's not creating the offence he profits from. Max Domi actually did a lot of that last season. There is a straight line between SDA to Domi in terms of how they played some hockey in the offensive zone, shot the puck a little but not well, and relied on the one-trick Robertson to put it in the net. But no matter how much Robertson tells himself that he is going to have a great season, no matter how hard he runs with that, he's caught in the jaws of fortune here, and he may rise or fall no matter what he does.

But if he had a game that made him a regular, third-line, 12 minutes a night guy, he'd be doing it already and there wouldn't be anything to argue about.

The Votes

My bottom line with Robertson is that he is never going to morph into a top-six asset. He might get used on a third line in the way players do where, when you look up their ice time halfway through the season, you discover they play less than most of the fourth line. He will likely score some goals, and likely not at the same rate as the year before last – the season juicing his career stats a little – but he'll score. No one else will shoot or score very much until he goes and sits down. (This is also fairly true for Auston Matthews, but with him it's a feature, not a bug.)

All that led me to rank him fifth. He's legitimately an NHLer of very limited value. Better than Freddie Gauthier, not as good as Ilya Mikheyev. Less versatile than Steven Lorentz. But an NHLer. And to me, the probable outcome of everyone I ranked below him is not that based on what I know now. Or think I know.

Voter	Vote
Cathy	5
Brigstew	7
Species	7
Hardev	5
shinson93	6
Cameron	7
Zone Entry	6
Svalbard38	4
dhammm	4
adam	4
Weighted Average	5.5
Highest Vote	4
Lowest Vote	7

This is not the tightest vote spread, obviously, we're going to see those in the next few rankings. But it is the closest so far. There's no real disagreement here on where he ranks relative to the other players on this list, but when you step outside this exercise, the passionate disagreement about the value of his one-trick, how you measure it, what matters and what doesn't, is epic.

The Opinions

Brigstew: He’s a depth NHL guy who can score some goals, but not at a particularly high level. He doesn’t drive play or have above average defense, even if he isn’t a major liability in those areas from what I recall. At this point I think he’s just A Guy, not a major needle mover. That’s still a pretty good outcome for a player taken in the second round, especially with his history and what he’s had to deal with to get there, but I ranked him below this.

Shinson93: Robertson has made it to the NHL, which is hard to do. While he’s still fairly young, it’s hard to see him progressing any more than he already has. He plays hard and can find the back of the net, but he seems to struggle finding chemistry with any linemates or in a way that can keep the puck out of his own net.. There will be very few players on this list to get to his level.

dhammm: On one hand, a player who seems to pot goals and never cheats you on effort. On the other, a player who will bungle possessions, can struggle to make things happen for others on his line, and takes bad penalties because of his misreads. It adds up to a positive player by GAR but a frustrating one—but an NHL player, and above replacement at that, which puts him high on my ranking by default.

Svalbard38: I think we’re nearing the end of Nick Robertson’s time in Toronto, and I think we have been for some time. He asked for a trade last offseason and was turned down, only to find himself on the outside looking in when the games got meaningful. At this point, it feels pretty clear that Berube doesn’t trust Robertson, and I don’t think Berube is wholly unjustified in that. He’s a great shooter and I fully think he has it in him to be a 25 goal scorer, but if it happens it won’t be for us. I don’t think he’s going to be a Leaf after the trade deadline.

Species: It’s not only Berube, it’s a long list of coaches from the Leafs and the Marlies that appear not to trust him. I don’t know why, but in my mind it isn’t authority bias, it's that if he can’t get time or a connection from anyone over so many years I have to suspect there’s a reason, and it’s been enough time and enough authorities that it can’t have always been “there’s no slot available at his position.” I think he should have an NHL job, but somewhere else.

Your turn. What is your take on the facts, the guesses and the unknowable future.

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