This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Eric Robinson

Undrafted, three hundred and six games, and three career shorthanded goals from a fourth line.

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

2017-18	CBJ	1	0	0	0	+1	0	0	0	0	2	0.0	11:21
2018-19	CBJ	13	0	0	0	-4	0	0	0	0	18	0.0	11:50
2019-20	CBJ	50	7	5	12	+10	12	0	0	3	69	10.1	10:57
2020-21	CBJ	56	8	10	18	+6	4	0	1	2	75	10.7	12:24
2021-22	CBJ	67	10	17	27	-1	18	0	2	1	104	9.6	13:54
2022-23	CBJ	72	12	12	24	-21	6	0	0	1	98	12.2	13:57
2023-24	CBJ/BUF	47	3	7	10	-3	19	0	0	1	61	4.9	11:20
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	306	40	51	91	-12	59	0	3	8	427	9.4	12:40

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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 7 assists in 47 games for Buffalo — 10 points at 11:20 a night, minus-3, with 1 game-winner on 61 shots at 4.92 per cent, and 19 penalty minutes.

43.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 511 minutes, the 14th percentile. His ice went 15-19 against an expectation of 19.91-25.55 — four goals scored above expectation and ten fewer conceded, on a club that missed the playoffs.

The Finesse Game

61 attempts at a median of 20 feet, with 48 per cent from inside 20 and 13 per cent from beyond 40, converting at 4.92 per cent. Forty goals in 306 career games; he shoots from the right places and does not score from them.

7 assists. He does not create and the puck does not stay on his stick.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 220. He forechecks first and he closes on a defenceman faster than almost any fourth-line forward in the league — the skating is the top end of the roster and the size behind it makes the arrival matter.

19 penalty minutes in 47 games and 59 in 306 for his career is a genuinely low rate for a forward who plays this way. He does not retaliate. He is trusted a man short and has 3 career shorthanded goals.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Princeton, and 306 NHL games and 91 points at 29 across three clubs.

He was signed here in the summer. An undrafted forward with three hundred NHL games who kills penalties and does not take them is exactly what the club with the second-best penalty kill in the league should be buying, and it cost nothing.

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
he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“**Undrafted**, out of Princeton, and **306 NHL games and 91 points at 29** across three clubs.”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“**He forechecks first and he closes on a defenceman faster than almost any fourth-line forward in the league** — the skating is the top end of the roster and the size behind it makes the arrival matter.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“**He is trusted a man short and has 3 career shorthanded goals.**”
retaliateshe lacks it· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty
“**19 penalty minutes in 47 games and 59 in 306 for his career** is a genuinely low rate for a forward who plays this way. He does not retaliate.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“7 assists. **He does not create and the puck does not stay on his stick.**”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 511 minutes

Expected goals: 43.8%; 14th pct
Shot attempts: 50.1%; 56th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 15 for, 19 against. Expected: 19.9 and 25.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

24th

Numbers

14th

The two rank him within 10 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 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, 2023-24 · 47 games

Top speed: 22.7 mph; 77th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.40 a game
Distance: 1.86 miles a game
Hardest shot: 82.0 mph; 25th 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

2023-24 with BUF · 427 minutes at five-on-five

Zemgus Girgensonsnow TBL43%
Peyton Krebs43%
Kyle Okposooff the roster30%

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, 2023-24

The club: BUF took 48.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.8% — 5.1 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 511 minutes at five-on-five — 18th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Zemgus Girgensons	49.1%	41.0%	44.3%
Peyton Krebs	51.2%	39.4%	46.0%
Owen Power	45.0%	43.4%	49.4%

49.1% together, 41.0% for him apart and 44.3% for Girgensons apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

91 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 20 feet. 48% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.