Devon Toews

The defenceman who makes the best defenceman in the world possible, and gets a fraction of the attention.

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

2018-19	NYI	48	5	13	18	+7	4	1	0	2	81	6.2	17:54
2019-20	NYI	68	6	22	28	+1	16	1	0	1	122	4.9	20:31
2020-21	COL	53	9	22	31	+29	16	2	0	2	121	7.4	24:46
2021-22	COL	66	13	44	57	+52	20	2	0	3	158	8.2	25:22
2022-23	COL	80	7	43	50	+39	26	1	0	0	165	4.2	25:06
2023-24	COL	82	12	38	50	+28	18	0	0	2	159	7.5	23:26
2024-25	COL	76	10	34	44	+30	26	1	0	4	138	7.2	24:35
2025-26	COL	68	3	21	24	+37	32	1	0	1	115	2.6	22:22
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	541	65	237	302	+223	158	9	0	15	1059	6.1	23:13

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

3 goals and 21 assists in 68 games, plus-37, on 22 and a half minutes a night. He played 58 percent of his 5-on-5 time with Makar, which is the most valuable partnership on this roster.

The Finesse Game

He is a far better puck-mover than the point totals suggest. The first pass is quick and almost always the right one, and he can beat a forecheck by himself when the outlet is not there. What he does not do is carry the puck up the ice or activate into the offensive zone, because his partner does both and somebody has to be home.

The shot is a get-it-through shot. He does not need more.

The skating is smooth and quietly excellent. He closes gaps early and defends the rush by taking away time.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 191, and he defends positionally rather than physically. He is strong on the wall for his size and does not get overpowered in front of his own net as often as the frame suggests.

The Intangibles

A fourth-round pick acquired for 2 second-rounders, which is one of the more lopsided trades of the last decade and is still not widely recognised as such.

He is 32, plays enormous minutes, and has been plus-30 or better repeatedly. The plainest measure of him: his partner is the best defenceman alive and it is genuinely unclear how much of that is the pairing.

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.

slot-man· shoots from where goals are scored
18.3% of his attempts in the slot, 91st percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.69) · 44% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
61% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 94th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,224 minutes

Expected goals: 59.1%; 99th pct
Shot attempts: 57.5%; 96th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 71 for, 42 against. Expected: 66.0 and 45.7.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

95th

Numbers

99th

The two rank him within 4 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 — 82 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 · 68 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 70th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.81 a game
Distance: 3.18 miles a game
Hardest shot: 91.6 mph; 56th 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 — 1 goals, 5 assists, 18 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1224 minutes at five-on-five

Cale Makar63%
Sam Malinski20%

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: COL took 56.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 59.1% — 2.2 above the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,224 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Cale Makar	57.2%	62.7%	54.0%
Nathan MacKinnon	64.2%	52.4%	54.7%
Martin Necas	62.5%	55.3%	52.4%

57.2% together, 62.7% for him apart and 54.0% for Makar apart. He was carrying it: the share stayed with him and left Makar behind.

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

164 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 15% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 64% from beyond forty.