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

Connor Zary

27 points in 54 games and a 52.2 per cent chance share, from the club's most promising young centre.

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

2023-24	CGY	63	14	20	34	+12	22	1	0	3	90	15.6	15:16
2024-25	CGY	54	13	14	27	-7	14	1	0	2	111	11.7	16:04
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	117	27	34	61	+5	36	2	0	5	201	13.4	15:38

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

13 goals and 14 assists in 54 games for 27 points, minus-7, on 16:04 a night.

51.0 per cent at five-on-five, the 62nd percentile — the second-best figure among the club’s forwards. 49 per cent of his shots came from inside 20 feet at a median of 21, which is the interior profile of a scorer.

The Finesse Game

The most complete young forward in the organisation. He carries the puck into the zone, he can make a play at speed, and he gets to the interior rather than settling for the wall.

111 shots in 54 games is a good volume and 11.7 per cent is a fair rate. What is missing is consistency of impact rather than skill — the good games are top-six games and there are still too many quiet ones.

The Physical Game

6 feet and 178, and light. He is willing on the forecheck and cannot yet win a puck against an NHL defenceman below the goal line.

14 penalty minutes over 54 games. The injuries are the real concern — he has not completed a season yet in three professional years.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick, a slow start to professional hockey, and two half-seasons of genuinely encouraging NHL play.

At 24 the projection is a second-line centre, and the club needs one badly — Backlund is 36 and Kadri is 34. The availability is the thing standing between him and 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
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
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.

transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He carries the puck into the zone, he can make a play at speed, and he gets to the interior rather than settling for the wall.”
forechecks-aggressivelypresent and ordinary· first man in, and on the puck
“He is willing on the forecheck and cannot yet win a puck against an NHL defenceman below the goal line.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He is willing on the forecheck and cannot yet win a puck against an NHL defenceman below the goal line.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 735 minutes

Expected goals: 51%; 63rd pct
Shot attempts: 53%; 83rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 20 for, 22 against. Expected: 28.6 and 27.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

72nd

Numbers

63rd

The two rank him within 9 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 — 76 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 · 54 games

Top speed: 22.0 mph; 38th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.80 a game
Distance: 2.85 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.3 mph; 80th 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 · 735 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: CGY took 48.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.0% — 2.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 735 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Blake Coleman	55.6%	47.9%	50.5%
Rasmus Andersson	49.2%	52.0%	48.5%
MacKenzie Weegar	53.6%	49.8%	50.4%

55.6% together, 47.9% for him apart and 50.5% for Coleman 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

158 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 12 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 49% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 11% from beyond forty.