What Does A Mean in Hockey? Assists (A)

The assist rule is one short paragraph of the rulebook. Rule 78.3 credits "the player or players (maximum two) who touch the puck prior to the goal scorer," as long as no defender plays the puck or controls it in between, and it adds that only one point can go to any player on a goal. That last clause is why a defenseman who starts a rush and finishes it gets the goal and nothing more. The In-Arena Scorer makes the call from video replay and records the assisting players next to every scorer's name, and a team has 24 hours to appeal what he decides.

Assists weren't always this common. The NHL's own records show no secondary assists at all in the league's first five seasons, and skaters averaged fewer than one assist per goal every year until 1931-32. The rate has stayed between 1.61 and 1.74 in every season since 1960-61, so today's 1.69 is the norm and the early years are the outlier.

The split between first and second assists is official. NHL.com's stats glossary defines the primary assist as the teammate who touched the puck directly before the scorer and the secondary as the one before that, and it calls goals plus primary assists a player's primary points. Analysts weight the two differently. Game Score, the single-game rating Dom Luszczyszyn introduced at Hockey-Graphs in 2016, values a goal at 0.75, a primary assist at 0.7 and a secondary at 0.55. The NHL's stats pages and MoneyPuck's data files both carry the split for every skater, and this site uses the league's official count.

Counting assists means tracing the puck backward from the goal. The scorer starts with the goal scorer and walks the play back through the scoring team's touches until an opponent plays the puck or takes control of it, then credits up to two teammates. These are the inputs:

• The goal scorer, who can't also get an assist on the same goal
• The last teammate to touch the puck before him (the primary assist)
• The teammate who touched it before that (the secondary assist)
• Whether an opponent played the puck or took control in between, which wipes out the earlier touches
• Video replay, which the scorer uses to check every touch (Rule 33.2)

Here's a worked example, with an invented play. A defenseman wins a puck battle behind his own net and moves it to his center, who carries it through the neutral zone and drops it to a winger. The winger scores. The center gets the primary assist and the defenseman the secondary. Had an opponent poked the puck loose between the center and the winger, who then picked it up and scored, the goal would've gone in unassisted.

Most goals come with the full set. Roughly three goals in four carried two assists last season and only about 6% went in with none, which is why a team's assist column runs so far ahead of its goal column.

Assists measure involvement in the play that scored, at one or two removes, and that's the A's whole meaning in hockey box scores. The rule only asks who touched the puck and in what order, so a secondary assist can come from the breakout pass that started a rush or from a point shot that one teammate tipped and another buried. It doesn't ask which touch was the clever one.

Defensemen nearly match forwards here, which they don't come close to doing in goals. Among last season's regulars (60 or more games), the median forward had 21 assists and the median defenseman 20, while the top tenth of forwards had 43 or more. Connor McDavid led the league with 90.

Lucas Raymond led Detroit with 51 assists, and 34 of them were primary. Moritz Seider had 50, tied for ninth among the league's defensemen, on a near-even split of primary and secondary. Alex DeBrincat added 44, a little more than half of them primary, to go with his team-leading 41 goals.

Position shapes the split. Among last season's regulars, forwards' assists were 59% primary and defensemen's 48%. The eight most secondary-heavy players among those with 40 or more assists were all defensemen, and David Pastrnak sat at the other end of the list, with 57 of his 71 assists primary.

Do assists repeat? Primary assists do, a little better than secondary ones. Among forwards who played 60 games in each of the last two seasons, primary assists per game correlated at 0.80 across the pair and secondary assists at 0.73. Defensemen's two numbers were level (0.71 and 0.70), so a blueliner's second assists aren't the noise they're often taken for.

Stripping out the second assist

Primary points keep goals and first assists and drop the rest. DeBrincat goes from 85 points to 65 primary points, and Raymond and Larkin each lose a similar share of theirs. Seider falls from 60 to 36, the biggest relative drop of the four and the league-wide pattern for defensemen in one line. It's a quick way to see whose total leans on the second assist.

Measuring a playmaker's share

Individual points percentage divides a player's points by the goals his team scored while he was on the ice. By MoneyPuck's all-situations counts, DeBrincat and Raymond each figured in 69% of the goals scored with them on the ice last season and Larkin in 65%. Seider's 43% looks low until you remember that defensemen scored only 15% of the league's goals. Compare a player against his own position before you read anything into his share.

Reading the power play

Assists pile up fastest with the man advantage. Power-play goals carried 1.91 assists apiece last season, against 1.66 for goals at even strength, and Seider's 28 power-play points were the most on the team (he had 32 at even strength). Before you rate any defenseman's assist total, check how much of it came on the power play.

One touch is all it takes

A secondary assist for a short pass behind your own net counts the same as one for a cross-ice feed through two defenders, because the rule records who touched the puck and can't say how much the touch mattered.

It can't see the pass that set up a miss

The league's event feed records shots and goals but not passes, so a perfect feed that a teammate fires wide earns nothing. The chances a passer creates never show up in his line unless somebody finishes them.

It depends on the finisher

Every assist needs a teammate to score, so a center whose wingers shoot 8% will collect fewer than one whose wingers shoot 14% even if he makes exactly the same passes.

The scorer makes judgment calls

Scrambles in front, tips and passes that brush an opponent's stick all come down to the In-Arena Scorer's read of the replay. A team has 24 hours to ask the league to change it, so the assists in the next morning's box score aren't always the ones announced in the building.

Can a goalie get an assist?

Yes. The rule credits any player who touched the puck, goalies included, and goalies collected 58 assists last season (Jacob Markstrom led them with four). Each one came from a touch that started a play the other team never broke up.

Who has the most assists in NHL history?

Wayne Gretzky, with 1,963, and he holds the single-season record of 163 as well. Steve Yzerman's 1,063 are the Red Wings record, and his 1988-89 season is still the franchise's best.