Armchair Hockey Scout

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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.
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81

Dakota Joshua

Toronto Maple Leafs Center

Fourteen points in 57 games in the season after testicular cancer surgery.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2020-21STL12101-37000911.18:58
2021-22STL30358+616002319.78:30
2022-23VAN79111223-16601127115.511:31
2023-24VAN63181432+19601058421.414:23
2024-25VAN577714-13381105213.512:58
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—241403878-718132924716.212:06

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

7 goals and 7 assists in 57 games for Vancouver — 14 points at 12:58 a night, minus-13, with a shorthanded goal and 38 penalty minutes.

He was diagnosed with testicular cancer in the summer of 2024, had surgery, and missed the first month of the season. The year before he scored 18 goals and had 32 points. There is no useful way to read the decline as a hockey question.

The Finesse Game

52 attempts and 7 goals at 13.5 per cent in 57 games. The shot is real and the volume was not there.

7 assists in 57 games. He is not a creator; he is a forechecker who scores from the paint, and 78 points in 241 NHL games is the honest ceiling.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 218 and among the harder forecheckers in the league. He hits everything, he wins pucks below the goal line, and he is not moved from the front of a net.

38 penalty minutes in 57 games is a high rate. He plays with a genuine edge, he goes into the scrum, and he draws the response.

The Intangibles

A fifth-round pick of Toronto in 2014 who never signed here, went to college, and reached the NHL at 25 with St. Louis — 241 games and 78 points.

He is 29 and Toronto acquired him from Vancouver in the summer, eleven years after drafting him. On a club that has been called soft for a decade, the fit is not subtle.

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
  • 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.

  • slot-man· shoots from where goals are scored

    77.4% of his attempts in the slot, 100th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.69) · 44% keep it

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

    “**6-3 and 218 and among the harder forecheckers in the league.** He hits everything, he wins pucks below the goal line, and he is not moved from the front of a net.”

  • wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line

    “He hits everything, he wins pucks below the goal line, and he is not moved from the front of a net.”

  • hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand

    “He hits everything, he wins pucks below the goal line, and he is not moved from the front of a net.”

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

    “He plays with a genuine edge, he goes into the scrum, and he draws the response.”

  • nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point

    “He plays with a genuine edge, he goes into the scrum, and he draws the response.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 629 minutes

Expected goals
47.8%
33rd pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
45.4%
14th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 15 for, 26 against. Expected: 22.1 and 24.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
55th
Numbers
33rd

The report ranks him 22 points above where the numbers do. 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. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

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 — 73 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 · 57 games

Top speed
21.0 mph
8th pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
0.39 a game

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

Distance
2.09 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
83.4 mph
35th 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 with VAN · 629 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
VAN took 49.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.8% — 1.3 below the club he did it on.
The role
Second line, 629 minutes at five-on-five — 23rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Conor Garland50.6%44.6%53.9%
Pius Suter48.2%47.6%50.4%
Tyler Myers55.0%43.7%49.1%

50.6% together, 44.6% for him apart and 53.9% for Garland apart. He was the one being carried: the share went with Garland and did not follow 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

84 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 7 of them goals. His median goal came from 6 feet. 73% of his shots came from inside twenty feet.