Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2025-26 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

65

Brett Berard

New York Rangers Left Wing

5-9 and 175, and he forechecks like the biggest man on the ice.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2024-25NYR356410-680015910.210:43
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—356410-680015910.210:43

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

6 goals and 4 assists in 35 games — 10 points, minus-6, at 10:43 a night on 8 penalty minutes. His first NHL season.

43.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 10th percentile, across 333 minutes. 59 attempts in 35 games is a high rate for a fourth-line winger and it is the most encouraging thing in the file.

The Finesse Game

The skating is the tool. He is among the quicker forwards on the roster over the first three strides and he uses it to arrive first rather than to carry the puck, which is the correct application of it at his size.

The finish is not there yet. 6 goals on 59 shots at a median of 26 feet with 32 per cent of attempts from inside 20 is the shot chart of a man getting to reasonable places and shooting from the edge of them. The volume says the habits are right and the hands have to catch up.

The Physical Game

5-9 and 175 pounds, and he plays as though he does not know it. He is first in on the forecheck, he takes the body against defencemen forty pounds heavier, and he goes to the front of the net where he is regularly removed from it.

8 penalty minutes in 35 games is quiet. He cannot win a wall against an NHL defenceman and no amount of willingness is going to change that; what it changes is whether the puck gets out of the zone, and often enough it does.

The Intangibles

A fifth-round pick out of Providence who is 23 and has played 35 NHL games.

The read is a fourth-line winger who kills penalties and irritates people, with a small chance of more if the finishing arrives. On a club with almost nothing cheap in its bottom six, that is worth a roster spot.

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
  • he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

  • forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck

    “He is first in on the forecheck, he takes the body against defencemen forty pounds heavier, and he goes to the front of the net where he is regularly removed from it.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He cannot win a wall against an NHL defenceman and no amount of willingness is going to change that”

  • agitatora strength· gets under the skin; draws the retaliation

    “The read is a fourth-line winger who kills penalties and irritates people, with a small chance of more if the finishing arrives.”

  • penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short

    “The read is a fourth-line winger who kills penalties and irritates people, with a small chance of more if the finishing arrives.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 333 minutes

Expected goals
43.4%
11th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
45.1%
13th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 11 for, 17 against. Expected: 12.0 and 15.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
17th
Numbers
11th

The two rank him within 6 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 — 66 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 · 35 games

Top speed
22.9 mph
81st pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
1.77 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
1.74 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
84.5 mph
40th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.9

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 · 333 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
NYR took 47.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.4% — 4.3 below the club he did it on.
The role
333 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Sam Carrick41.1%44.9%45.5%
Braden Schneider39.6%45.2%47.0%
Adam Fox59.9%35.6%53.6%

41.1% together, 44.9% for him apart and 45.5% for Carrick apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

75 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 26 feet. 32% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 19% from beyond forty.