This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Colin Blackwell
Dallas Stars Center
5-8, 181 pounds, 32 years old, and a fourth-liner who was on the ice for 29 goals and 21 against.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | NSH | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0.0 | 9:44 |
| 2019-20 | NSH | 27 | 3 | 7 | 10 | +7 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 31 | 9.7 | 10:57 |
| 2020-21 | NYR | 47 | 12 | 10 | 22 | +2 | 15 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 64 | 18.8 | 14:00 |
| 2021-22 | SEA/TOR | 58 | 10 | 10 | 20 | 0 | 14 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 77 | 13.0 | 11:56 |
| 2022-23 | CHI | 53 | 2 | 8 | 10 | -16 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 53 | 3.8 | 11:48 |
| 2023-24 | CHI | 44 | 8 | 4 | 12 | -2 | 10 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 88 | 9.1 | 14:30 |
| 2024-25 | DAL | 63 | 6 | 11 | 17 | +4 | 16 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 63 | 9.5 | 11:34 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 298 | 41 | 50 | 91 | -6 | 73 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 381 | 10.8 | 12:24 |
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 11 assists in 63 games for 17 points, plus-4, on 11:34 a night with 2 shorthanded goals.
50.6 per cent at five-on-five, the 58th percentile, and on-ice goals of 21-20 against an expected 21-20. That is a fourth line getting good goaltending, and it should be read that way rather than as a bottom-six forward driving results.
The Finesse Game
Quick feet and no finish. 63 shots and 6 goals, and the hands are ordinary for the level — he is on an NHL roster because of pace and effort rather than skill.
48 per cent of his attempts come from inside 20 feet, which for a man his size means he is going to places that cost him. The 2 shorthanded goals are the game in miniature: he is dangerous when the other club is careless, and not otherwise.
The Physical Game
5-8 and 181, one of the smallest players in the league, and he plays as though he does not know it. He finishes checks on men 40 pounds heavier, he blocks shots, and he gets to the net front.
16 penalty minutes over 63 games. The body has taken the price — he has not played a full season in years and has spent time on the injured list in most of them.
The Intangibles
A seventh-round pick in 2011, Harvard, seven organisations, and an NHL job at 32 that nobody handed him. He is the sort of player a coach names when asked who sets the standard in practice.
The projection is a thirteenth forward with penalty-kill value, and the risk is simply the calendar. A game built entirely on effort and pace at 5-8 does not have many years left in it.
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
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.
“He finishes checks on men 40 pounds heavier, he blocks shots, and he gets to the net front.”
“he blocks shots”
“he gets to the net front”
“The projection is a thirteenth forward with penalty-kill value”
“He is the sort of player a coach names when asked who sets the standard in practice.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 580 minutes
- Expected goals
- 50.6%
- 59th pct
- Shot attempts
- 52%
- 73rd pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 21 for, 20 against. Expected: 20.7 and 20.2.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 1 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 — 74 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 · 63 games
- Top speed
- 23.7 mph
- 97th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.05 a game
- Distance
- 1.86 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.0 mph
- 72nd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
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 · 580 minutes at five-on-five
- Oskar Bäck69%
- Sam Steel49%
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
- DAL took 50.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.6% — 0.1 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 580 minutes at five-on-five — 21st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oskar Bäck | 48.7% | 54.5% | 50.1% |
| Sam Steel | 47.0% | 54.7% | 51.3% |
| Esa Lindell | 53.3% | 49.1% | 50.2% |
48.7% together, 54.5% for him apart and 50.1% for Bäck apart. He was better away from Bäck, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Bäck.
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
77 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 48% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 26% from beyond forty.