This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Aaron Ekblad
Florida Panthers Defense
33 points in 56 games and a plus-11, in a season interrupted by a 20-game suspension.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | FLA | 81 | 12 | 27 | 39 | +12 | 32 | 6 | 0 | 4 | 170 | 7.1 | 21:49 |
| 2015-16 | FLA | 78 | 15 | 21 | 36 | +18 | 41 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 182 | 8.2 | 21:41 |
| 2016-17 | FLA | 68 | 10 | 11 | 21 | -23 | 58 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 225 | 4.4 | 21:28 |
| 2017-18 | FLA | 82 | 16 | 22 | 38 | +9 | 71 | 5 | 0 | 4 | 189 | 8.5 | 23:23 |
| 2018-19 | FLA | 82 | 13 | 24 | 37 | +1 | 47 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 180 | 7.2 | 23:39 |
| 2019-20 | FLA | 67 | 5 | 36 | 41 | +12 | 26 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 147 | 3.4 | 22:59 |
| 2020-21 | FLA | 35 | 11 | 11 | 22 | +5 | 33 | 6 | 0 | 3 | 101 | 10.9 | 25:05 |
| 2021-22 | FLA | 61 | 15 | 42 | 57 | +38 | 26 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 180 | 8.3 | 24:55 |
| 2022-23 | FLA | 71 | 14 | 24 | 38 | -14 | 68 | 8 | 1 | 2 | 216 | 6.5 | 23:24 |
| 2023-24 | FLA | 51 | 4 | 14 | 18 | +27 | 50 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 98 | 4.1 | 20:52 |
| 2024-25 | FLA | 56 | 3 | 30 | 33 | +11 | 53 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 106 | 2.8 | 23:31 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 732 | 118 | 262 | 380 | +96 | 505 | 41 | 2 | 26 | 1794 | 6.6 | 22:53 |
This Season So Far
The 2025-26 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
3 goals and 30 assists in 56 games for 33 points, plus-11, on 23:31 a night.
54.0 per cent at five-on-five, the 85th percentile, over 1,001 minutes. He served a 20-game suspension for a banned-substance violation and returned for the playoffs. 106 shots and 3 goals.
The Finesse Game
The passing is the strength and it is genuinely good — 30 assists in 56 games from a defenceman is a first-pair rate. He beats a forecheck cleanly and joins a rush when the situation is right.
3 goals on 106 attempts is a poor return and the release has thinned; he was a 15-goal defenceman early in his career and has not been one for years. The offence now is all distribution.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 220, and he plays a heavy game. He clears his crease, hits, and is one of the few men on this blue line who defends the paint by force.
53 penalty minutes over 56 games is a high rate. The injury history is long — he has cleared 70 games three times in eleven seasons.
The Intangibles
The 1st overall pick in 2014, eleven seasons in one organisation, two Cups, and a 20-game suspension that he accepted publicly and without excuse.
At 29 on a new long contract, the projection is a genuine top-pair defenceman for 65 games a year. The availability is the recurring cost and the club has re-signed him knowing it.
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.
“The passing is the strength and it is genuinely good — 30 assists in 56 games from a defenceman is a first-pair rate.”
“He beats a forecheck cleanly and joins a rush when the situation is right.”
“He clears his crease”
“He clears his crease, hits, and is one of the few men on this blue line who defends the paint by force.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,001 minutes
- Expected goals
- 54%
- 85th pct
- Shot attempts
- 55.5%
- 93rd 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: 45 for, 34 against. Expected: 45.2 and 38.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 1 points of one another. 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.
Both bars are percentiles among the 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 79 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, 2024-25 · 56 games
- Top speed
- 21.3 mph
- 35th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.18 a game
- Distance
- 3.25 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 86.4 mph
- 25th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 89.7
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
2024-25 · 1001 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, 2024-25
- The club
- FLA took 54.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.0% — level with the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,001 minutes at five-on-five — 61st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gustav Forsling | 54.5% | 50.4% | 53.9% |
| Sam Reinhart | 59.0% | 50.7% | 56.9% |
| Aleksander Barkov | 59.3% | 51.2% | 57.3% |
54.5% together, 50.4% for him apart and 53.9% for Forsling apart. He was worse away from Forsling, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Forsling 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
177 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 48 feet. 5% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 81% from beyond forty.