This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Alex Tuch

36 goals and an 18.4 per cent rate, and an on-ice goal differential of minus-14 to show for it.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2016-17	MIN	6	0	0	0	-3	0	0	0	0	8	0.0	10:42
2017-18	VGK	78	15	22	37	+3	27	4	0	4	171	8.8	15:15
2018-19	VGK	74	20	32	52	+13	8	3	0	6	180	11.1	16:44
2019-20	VGK	42	8	9	17	-10	8	3	0	2	98	8.2	14:37
2020-21	VGK	55	18	15	33	+16	28	2	0	3	142	12.7	16:50
2021-22	BUF	50	12	26	38	-3	14	2	1	0	139	8.6	18:25
2022-23	BUF	74	36	43	79	+14	20	8	1	9	218	16.5	19:09
2023-24	BUF	75	22	37	59	+9	54	2	1	7	192	11.5	19:30
2024-25	BUF	82	36	31	67	+16	47	3	6	4	196	18.4	19:15
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	536	167	215	382	+55	206	27	9	35	1344	12.4	17:33

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

36 goals and 31 assists in 82 games for 67 points, plus-16, on 19:15 a night with 6 shorthanded goals — the most in the league.

50 per cent at five-on-five, the 52nd percentile. His on-ice goals were 55-41 against an expected 41-41, which is the worst goal differential of any forward here: 14 goals against him on chances that were roughly even.

The Finesse Game

A 6-4 winger who skates like a much smaller one, and the combination is what makes him dangerous — he beats a defenceman wide and arrives at the net with the puck rather than having to shoot from where he was pushed.

41 per cent of his attempts come from inside 20 feet, so 18.4 per cent shooting is better supported by locations than most of the rates on this roster. The 6 shorthanded goals are the game in miniature: speed and reach turning a careless breakout into a goal.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 219, and he uses all of it. He forechecks hard, wins pucks on the wall against defencemen, and goes to the net front without being asked.

47 penalty minutes across 82 games. The durability is excellent — four consecutive full seasons in a style that punishes.

The Intangibles

Arrived in the Jack Eichel trade as the secondary piece and has become the most complete forward on the roster, and he has been open about how much playing at home means to him.

At 29, on a club that has now missed the playoffs in every season of his career here, he is the player a contender would pay most for and the one Buffalo would least like to move. That tension does not resolve quietly.

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.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“he beats a defenceman wide and arrives at the net with the puck rather than having to shoot from where he was pushed”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks hard, wins pucks on the wall against defencemen, and goes to the net front without being asked.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“wins pucks on the wall against defencemen”
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“goes to the net front without being asked”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“The 6 shorthanded goals are the game in miniature: speed and reach turning a careless breakout into a goal.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,067 minutes

Expected goals: 50%; 53rd pct
Shot attempts: 50.1%; 54th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 55 for, 41 against. Expected: 41.4 and 41.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

93rd

Numbers

53rd

The report ranks him 40 points above where the numbers do. 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. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

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 — 82 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 65th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.74 a game
Distance: 3.05 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.7 mph; 77th pct

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 · 1067 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: BUF took 47.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.0% — 2.1 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,067 minutes at five-on-five — 70th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Tage Thompson	53.5%	47.4%	49.3%
Bowen Byram	50.9%	49.4%	48.0%
Owen Power	46.7%	51.8%	47.3%

53.5% together, 47.4% for him apart and 49.3% for Thompson apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

315 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 39 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 41% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.