Photo by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Cutter Gauthier

41 goals, and almost none of them from where you would expect a 40-goal scorer to stand.

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

2023-24	ANA	1	0	1	1	+1	0	0	0	0	3	0.0	15:24
2024-25	ANA	82	20	24	44	+8	20	2	0	3	190	10.5	14:09
2025-26	ANA	76	41	28	69	-2	28	11	0	7	285	14.4	17:15
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	159	61	53	114	+7	48	13	0	10	478	12.8	15:38

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 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

41 goals and 28 assists in 76 games — 69 points at 22, in his second full season. 285 shots on goal, which is a shooter’s volume, at 14.4 per cent.

The Finesse Game

The release is the skill. It is quick and it is disguised, and it goes in from distances that should not work: the median unblocked attempt of his season came from 34 feet out, and nearly a third of them from beyond 40. Only 23 per cent came from inside 20 feet. 40-goal scorers are usually built the other way round.

That is worth stating plainly because it cuts both ways. A shot that beats goaltenders from 40 feet is a real weapon and he has clearly got one. It is also the shot most likely to stop going in — distance shooting carries more luck in it than tap-ins do, and the expected-goals model liked his season a good deal less than the scoresheet did.

The skating is strong and straight-line. He gets to his spot and he fires.

The Physical Game

6-2, 205, and willing enough along the wall, though he is not going to win a game by being difficult to play against. 28 penalty minutes in 76 games is a player who stays out of the traffic.

The Intangibles

The fifth pick in 2022, traded before he ever played for the club that drafted him, and now the leading goal scorer on a young team that badly needed one. He was minus-2 on a roster that was collectively much worse than that, and the shot attempts went 54.7 per cent his way — 89th percentile.

The honest question is the shooting percentage. If it holds, he is a star. If it settles back toward 10 per cent, he is a 30-goal winger who needs a playmaker, and this club will have to find him one.

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

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.

perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
30.9% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,020 minutes

Expected goals: 51.3%; 66th pct
Shot attempts: 54.8%; 90th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 55 for, 56 against. Expected: 50.9 and 48.3.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

78th

Numbers

66th

The two rank him within 12 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

Both bars are percentiles among the 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 77 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, 2025-26 · 76 games

Top speed: 23.1 mph; 86th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.70 a game
Distance: 2.88 miles a game
Hardest shot: 99.9 mph; 100th 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 7 goals, 3 assists, 39 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1020 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, 2025-26

The club: ANA took 50.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.3% — 0.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,020 minutes at five-on-five — 62nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Mason McTavish	52.0%	50.6%	46.8%
Beckett Sennecke	54.1%	49.1%	49.6%
Jackson LaCombe	49.2%	52.5%	52.9%

52.0% together, 50.6% for him apart and 46.8% for McTavish apart. McTavish was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for McTavish than for him.

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

417 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 43 of them goals. His median goal came from 25 feet. 23% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 31% from beyond forty.