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

Brady Tkachuk

The captain took 123 penalty minutes, scored 29 goals in 72 games, and had the best chance share on the club while his ice was outscored 36-38.

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

2018-19	OTT	71	22	23	45	-10	75	4	0	3	214	10.3	16:01
2019-20	OTT	71	21	23	44	-14	106	2	0	3	259	8.1	18:56
2020-21	OTT	56	17	19	36	-17	69	5	0	3	220	7.7	18:14
2021-22	OTT	79	30	37	67	-7	117	9	0	3	288	10.4	18:48
2022-23	OTT	82	35	48	83	-10	126	11	0	6	347	10.1	18:38
2023-24	OTT	81	37	37	74	+1	134	12	0	2	357	10.4	19:09
2024-25	OTT	72	29	26	55	0	123	14	0	5	296	9.8	18:14
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	512	191	213	404	-57	750	57	0	25	1981	9.6	18:19

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

29 goals and 26 assists in 72 games — 55 points, 14 of the goals on the power play, 5 game-winners, and 123 penalty minutes, the most on the club by a distance.

54.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 91st percentile and the best figure on this roster. And the club was outscored 36-38 with him on the ice against an expectation of 45.44-37.37. Eighteen goals went missing in front of him over a season in which he did everything the chance model asks a first-line winger to do.

The Finesse Game

296 shots, more than anybody else here by a hundred, at a median of 25 feet with 41 per cent of them from inside 20. He does not shoot from the perimeter and he does not need to; the puck arrives at his stick in the paint because that is where he has already gone.

The hands are good rather than exceptional and the passing is honest. What separates him is that he gets to the front of the net on the power play and stays there while grown men try to remove him, which is why 14 of his 29 goals came on it.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 226 pounds and the hardest man in this chapter to play against. He finishes every check available to him, he wins pucks on the wall below the goal line, and he is not moved off the front of a net by anybody.

123 penalty minutes in 72 games is a captain who crosses the line and knows exactly where it is. Very little of it is retaliation and almost none of it is the stick foul of a man who has been beaten — it is the cost of playing the way he plays, and the club pays it willingly.

The Intangibles

Fourth overall in 2018, captain at 21, and 512 games into a career that has been spent almost entirely on bad hockey teams. The minus-57 on his record is a fact about the clubs, not about him.

Last spring was his first playoff series. The club lost it in six games to Toronto, three of the first four went to overtime, and he was the best player Ottawa had in it. Everything about the roster is built around the assumption that he is the standard.

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.

clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live
6 of his 29 goals late or in overtime, 95th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
54.9% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 48.3% for his club in the minutes he sat: +6.6, 95th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He does not shoot from the perimeter and he does not need to; the puck arrives at his stick in the paint because that is where he has already gone.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He finishes every check available to him, he wins pucks on the wall below the goal line, and he is not moved off the front of a net by anybody.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“He finishes every check available to him, he wins pucks on the wall below the goal line, and he is not moved off the front of a net by anybody.”
takes-libertiesa strength· crosses the line and knows where it is
“**123 penalty minutes in 72 games is a captain who crosses the line and knows exactly where it is.**”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“Fourth overall in 2018, captain at 21, and 512 games into a career that has been spent almost entirely on bad hockey teams.”
fouls-when-beatena strength· the stick foul that follows losing a step
“Very little of it is retaliation and almost none of it is the stick foul of a man who has been beaten — it is the cost of playing the way he plays, and the club pays it willingly.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 994 minutes

Expected goals: 54.9%; 90th pct
Shot attempts: 53.5%; 86th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 38 against. Expected: 45.4 and 37.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

97th

Numbers

90th

The two rank him within 7 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 — 84 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 · 72 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 40th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.75 a game
Distance: 2.58 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.1 mph; 92nd 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 · 994 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: OTT took 50.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.9% — 4.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 994 minutes at five-on-five — 60th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Tim Stützle	52.7%	57.4%	54.8%
Thomas Chabot	56.1%	54.0%	51.1%
Jake Sanderson	57.4%	53.4%	49.0%

52.7% together, 57.4% for him apart and 54.8% for Stützle apart. He was better away from Stützle, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Stützle.

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

408 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 29 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 41% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.