NHL teams and private analytics companies track an enormous range of detailed, event‑level data, such as zone entries, zone exits, puck retrievals, blocked passes, and far more. These sorts of metrics are what we can call “microstats,” which help us understand how and why a player or team achieves their given macro-level results. 

Inside NHL front offices, microstats are now common tools used to assist in decision‑making, especially as the league as a whole embraces analytics more and more. Unfortunately for us, however, the NHL does not provide us with a large variety of microstats. Most of the microstats that teams rely on simply aren’t available to fans and media.

Two of the few public metrics that do qualify as microstats are giveaways and takeaways, which have been available since the 1997-98 season.

On paper, these metrics seem incredibly useful. The NHL defines a giveaway as “a form of turnover where the player makes an unforced error,” and a takeaway as “a form of turnover in which the player takes the puck from the opposition.” In theory, giveaways should help us measure a player’s puck management and their ability to complete successful passes, while takeaways could be used to measure a player’s forechecking, entry defending, and cycle-busting ability depending on the zone in which it occurred.

If you’ve followed the league long enough, you’ve probably seen these numbers used at least occasionally in public analysis, and perhaps even frequently in discussions regarding a player’s defensive ability due to the lack of alternative defensive microstats available.

However, I believe these stats are deeply flawed. There are multiple issues involving how the NHL currently tracks giveaways and takeaways, issues so significant that I would make the claim that these metrics should hold little-to-no value at all when it comes to analysis. These flaws are simply too large and fundamental to dismiss.

Without further ado, here is a deep dive into the NHL’s giveaway and takeaway stats, and why you should not use them.

Reason 1: Many, if not most, turnovers are often not tracked

For this article, I decided to rewatch the first period of Game 2 of the 2026 Stanley Cup final and manually track turnovers myself. Specifically, I tracked which player lost possession, the opposing player who gained it, and the overall context of the play. Note that zone clears and dump-ins were not tracked as turnovers.

The aim of this exercise was to get a clearer sense of how the NHL actually tracks giveaways and takeaways, and to see whether they’re missing plays, something my own intuition has suggested for years given how unusually low these totals often appear. I wanted to test that suspicion directly, and what better sample to use than a Stanley Cup final game?

Here are the results:

That is… quite a huge discrepancy.

Now, human error exists, and this can particularly be the case in such a high-paced game like hockey. I was certainly not expecting my results to be precisely the same as the NHL’s. There may be plays where I may have missed or made an error on, and the scorekeeper for the game would probably want to say the same. 

Still, this is a massive difference. I counted 30 turnovers for Carolina and 24 for Vegas, while the NHL scorekeepers counted just 9 for Carolina and 5 for Vegas. Even allowing for some human error on both sides, that gap is just far too large to dismiss as simple noise. 

So, to properly assess what’s truly going on here, let’s take a look at the actual video and walk through plays where I assessed a turnover but the NHL did not.

The first play here starts with a dump-in by Vegas. Sebastian Aho (CAR #20) retrieves the dump-in and passes it to Shayne Gostisbehere (CAR #4), who tries to flip the puck out of the zone, but Cole Smith (VGK #22) knocks down the attempt and Vegas consequently spends about 20 seconds in the offensive-zone. This was a clear turnover in my eyes, as I assessed Gostisbehere a giveaway and Smith a takeaway. 

However, the NHL assessed nothing on the play at all.

The next play also begins with a Vegas dump-in. Jalen........

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