Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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.
← 2025-26 edition

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

53

Ethen Frank

Washington Capitals Right Wing

Undrafted, 27 years old, four goals in his first 24 NHL games, and the 87th percentile of chances.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2024-25WSH24437+360012317.410:49
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—24437+360012317.410:49

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 3 assists in 24 games — 7 points at 10:49 a night, plus-3, with a game-winner on 23 shots, converting at 17.4 per cent, and 6 penalty minutes.

52.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 87th percentile, across 235 minutes. His ice went 11-7 against an expectation of 9.36-8.43 on a sample far too small to argue from.

The Finesse Game

23 attempts in 24 games at a median of 23 feet with 42 per cent from inside 20, and 4 goals.

3 assists. The skating is the reason he is here at all — he is genuinely among the fastest players in the organisation and he beats defencemen wide from a standing start. There is very little else developed around it.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 188 and he does not play a physical game. He forechecks with speed rather than with force and he does not win pucks against defencemen.

6 penalty minutes in 24 games. He is uninvolved in that half of the game.

The Intangibles

Undrafted out of Western Michigan and 24 NHL games, having scored at a high rate in the American League for four seasons before anybody gave him a look.

He is 27. An undrafted 27-year-old who scores four goals in his first 24 games has almost no margin, and the whole file is whether the speed survives contact with a full season.

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 Western Michigan** and 24 NHL games, having scored at a high rate in the American League for four seasons before anybody gave him a look.”

  • forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck

    “He forechecks with speed rather than with force and he does not win pucks against defencemen.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He forechecks with speed rather than with force and he does not win pucks against defencemen.”

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “**The skating is the reason he is here at all** — he is genuinely among the fastest players in the organisation and he beats defencemen wide from a standing start.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 235 minutes

Expected goals
52.6%
74th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
50.7%
61st pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 11 for, 7 against. Expected: 9.4 and 8.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
42nd
Numbers
74th

The numbers rank him 32 points above where the report does. 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 — 71 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 · 24 games

Top speed
22.8 mph
78th pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
2.38 a game

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

Distance
1.69 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
85.0 mph
43rd 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 · 235 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
WSH took 50.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.6% — 1.8 above the club he did it on.
The role
235 minutes at five-on-five — 3rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Taylor Raddysh50.3%55.4%52.1%
Jakob Chychrun52.9%52.5%48.3%
Trevor van Riemsdyk58.1%49.9%49.9%

50.3% together, 55.4% for him apart and 52.1% for Raddysh apart. He was better away from Raddysh, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Raddysh.

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

31 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 20 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.