Photo by Daniel Sanford, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ben Kindel
Pittsburgh Penguins Center #81
Nineteen years old, thirty-five points, and the eighty-second percentile.
| Season | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-26 | 77 | 17 | 18 | 35 | -5 | 18 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 151 | 11.3 | 15:04 |
| Career | 77 | 17 | 18 | 35 | -5 | 18 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 151 | 11.3 | 15:04 |
Last Season
Seventeen goals and 18 assists in 77 games — 35 points, minus-five, at 15:04 a night with four power-play goals. His first professional season.
He was born in April 2007.
The Finesse Game
Clever rather than fast, and the reads are what got him drafted eleventh overall. He arrives where the puck is about to be and releases it before the check does.
Two hundred and twelve unblocked attempts, nineteen goals, median 26 feet with 39 per cent from inside twenty. That conversion is good and the location should tighten as he gets stronger.
Eighteen assists at nineteen in fifteen minutes a night is a real rate.
The Physical Game
Five foot eleven and 182 pounds, and he is a teenager. Eighteen penalty minutes. He is moved off pucks by grown men and will be until two summers have passed.
The Intangibles
Fifty-three point eight per cent of the expected goals, 82nd percentile, and 52.6 per cent of the shot attempts, 79th, across 940 minutes — with the chances 44.6 to 38.3 in his favour.
That is a genuinely strong underlying season for a nineteen-year-old, and unlike Schaefer in New York he was not being asked to carry the club to get it.
He is 19, and Pittsburgh has him arriving exactly as Crosby, Malkin and Letang reach the end. Four points in his last ten.