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

Cole Caufield

37 goals on 240 shots from 5-8, and a line outscored 63-44.

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

2020-21	MTL	10	4	1	5	-1	2	0	0	2	30	13.3	13:58
2021-22	MTL	67	23	20	43	-24	10	5	0	3	188	12.2	16:41
2022-23	MTL	46	26	10	36	-10	2	7	0	3	158	16.5	18:03
2023-24	MTL	82	28	37	65	-4	16	9	0	7	314	8.9	19:25
2024-25	MTL	82	37	33	70	+9	14	10	0	8	240	15.4	18:05
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	287	118	101	219	-30	44	31	0	23	930	12.7	17:59

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

37 goals and 33 assists in 82 games for 70 points, plus-9, on 18:05 a night with 10 on the power play, 8 game-winners and 240 shots — the most on the club.

50.0 per cent at five-on-five, the 52nd percentile, with on-ice goals of 63-44 against an expected 51.5-51.6. 15.4 per cent conversion is close to his career rate.

The Finesse Game

One of the purest shooters in the league. The release is exceptionally quick and it comes off the pass without settling, which is what beats a goaltender who has read the play correctly — 240 attempts in 18 minutes a night is a very high volume and the shot justifies it.

38 per cent of his attempts come from inside 20 feet, so he is not a perimeter shooter despite the size. 33 assists is functional and he does not drive a line; he is the finisher on somebody else’s.

The Physical Game

5-8 and 175, and among the smallest forwards in the league. He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with force, and is removed from possession by any defenceman who gets a body on him.

14 penalty minutes over 82 games. The durability has been excellent — three consecutive full seasons, which for a man this size playing on the interior is a genuine achievement.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick, a Hobey Baker, and a career that survived a serious shoulder injury and two coaching changes before becoming what it was always supposed to be.

At 24 the projection is 35 goals a year for a decade. The reservation is the chance share: a 33rd-percentile forward scoring 37 goals is a scorer being carried, and the club has not yet built a line that carries him well.

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
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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“33 assists is functional and he does not drive a line; he is the finisher on somebody else's.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with force, and is removed from possession by any defenceman who gets a body on him.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with force, and is removed from possession by any defenceman who gets a body on him.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“is removed from possession by any defenceman who gets a body on him”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,088 minutes

Expected goals: 50%; 53rd pct
Shot attempts: 50.9%; 63rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 63 for, 44 against. Expected: 51.5 and 51.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

66th

Numbers

53rd

The two rank him within 13 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 — 75 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: 22.2 mph; 44th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.20 a game
Distance: 3.02 miles a game
Hardest shot: 88.8 mph; 71st 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 · 1088 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: MTL took 48.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.0% — 1.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,088 minutes at five-on-five — 74th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nick Suzuki	51.8%	36.9%	48.7%
Juraj Slafkovský	50.7%	48.4%	46.9%
Mike Matheson	46.7%	53.1%	46.7%

51.8% together, 36.9% for him apart and 48.7% for Suzuki 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

350 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 39 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 38% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.