Armchair Hockey Scout

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2026-27 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 2026-27 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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Dylan Samberg

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

Dylan Samberg

Winnipeg Jets Defense #54

A 6-4 defensive defenceman who plays 22 minutes and shows up on almost no scoresheet.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22WPG15055+34000140.014:51
2022-23WPG63268+1025000494.114:56
2023-24WPG7811718+1643000771.315:38
2024-25WPG6061420+3426002956.321:08
2025-26WPG6611314+514000871.121:49
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—282105565+681120023223.118:03

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

1 goal and 14 points in 66 games, plus-5, on 21 and 3-quarter minutes a night. 10 goals in 282 career games is the honest measure of his offensive contribution.

The Finesse Game

Minimal by design. He makes the simple exit, does not hold the puck, and does not join a rush. 87 shots across a season for a defenceman with this ice time is a very low volume and entirely consistent with what he is asked to do.

The skating is better than the frame suggests — he closes gaps well and can turn and retrieve against a hard forecheck, which is the requirement for playing these minutes.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 216, and this is the value. He clears the front of his own net, wins wall battles by simply being larger, and defends the rush by taking away the middle and daring an attacker to go outside.

He blocks a great many shots and has missed time because of it.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick who developed slowly through college and the minors and arrived as a fully formed defensive defenceman rather than a project that needed offence added.

At 27 he is entering the years where this kind of player is at his best. The pairing behind the top 2 has been unsettled for a while, and he is the most likely candidate to stabilise it.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,231 minutes

Expected goals
50.1%
55th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
51.2%
68th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 42 for, 43 against. Expected: 45.7 and 45.5.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
73rd
Numbers
55th

The two rank him within 18 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 — 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, 2025-26 · 66 games

Top speed
21.7 mph
51st pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6

Bursts over 20 mph
0.41 a game

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

Distance
3.01 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
90.1 mph
48th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 88.9

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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

1

points in his last 10 games — 0 goals, 1 assists, 21 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1231 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
WPG took 47.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.1% — 2.8 above the club he did it on.
The role
Second pair, 1,231 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Neal Pionk47.4%51.4%43.8%
Adam Lowry50.2%50.0%47.0%
Cole Perfetti48.2%50.7%50.0%

47.4% together, 51.4% for him apart and 43.8% for Pionk apart. He was carrying it: the share stayed with him and left Pionk 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

134 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 74% from beyond forty.