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

Elmer Soderblom

6-8 and 252 pounds, 26 games, and the largest forward in the league after Adam Klapka.

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

2022-23	DET	21	5	3	8	0	8	0	0	2	30	16.7	12:04
2024-25	DET	26	4	7	11	+2	6	0	0	1	38	10.5	13:22
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	47	9	10	19	+2	14	0	0	3	68	13.2	12:47

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

4 goals and 7 assists in 26 games for 11 points, plus-2, on 13:22 a night.

50.0 per cent at five-on-five, the 52nd percentile, over 328 minutes — a better share than most of the forwards ahead of him. 38 shots in 26 games with 47 per cent from inside 20 feet.

The Finesse Game

Considerably better than a man of this size should have. The hands work in tight, the release from the net front is quick, and he can make a short pass under pressure — 7 assists in 26 games is a real rate.

The volume is low and the offence is entirely close-range. Nothing about him will produce a goal from distance.

The Physical Game

6-8 and 252, one of the two largest forwards in the league, and he is immovable at the net front. He wins pucks below the goal line by weight and changes what a defenceman is willing to do in his own corner.

6 penalty minutes in 26 games is remarkable. The skating is the limitation — he cannot keep pace with a fast transition, and that is why the ice time has come in bursts.

The Intangibles

A sixth-round pick, three seasons split between two continents, and a genuine NHL role that has never quite stuck.

The projection is a third-line net-front forward. On a club that finished 26th in creating chances, a man who is unmovable in the paint and has hands is worth more patience than he has been given.

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

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.

net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“The hands work in tight, the release from the net front is quick, and he can make a short pass under pressure”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“6-8 and 252, one of the two largest forwards in the league, and he is immovable at the net front.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“He wins pucks below the goal line by weight and changes what a defenceman is willing to do in his own corner.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 328 minutes

Expected goals: 50%; 53rd pct
Shot attempts: 48.4%; 37th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 15 for, 12 against. Expected: 14.5 and 14.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

36th

Numbers

53rd

The two rank him within 17 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 — 70 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 · 26 games

Top speed: 21.8 mph; 28th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.96 a game
Distance: 2.23 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.0 mph; 79th 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 · 328 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: DET took 48.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.0% — 1.8 above the club he did it on.
The role: 328 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Michael Rasmussen	45.6%	53.3%	46.9%
Moritz Seider	52.8%	48.6%	50.0%
Ben Chiarot	48.0%	51.1%	44.6%

45.6% together, 53.3% for him apart and 46.9% for Rasmussen apart. He was better away from Rasmussen, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Rasmussen.

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

66 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 47% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.