Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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.

20

Fabian Zetterlund

Ottawa Senators Left Wing

17 goals from 13 minutes a night.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22NJD14358+50000368.313:21
2022-23NJD/SJS6761723-6141011185.113:15
2023-24SJS82242044-343361020411.818:51
2024-25SJS/OTT84192241+71450018110.516:21
2025-26OTT82171633-11650313212.912:55
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—3296980149-2977171467110.315:21

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

17 goals and 16 assists in all 82 games — 33 points, minus-1, at 12:55 a night with 5 power-play goals.

The Finesse Game

208 unblocked attempts, 17 goals, median 30 feet with only 37 per cent from inside 20 — a lot of shooting from middle distance for a bottom-6 forward.

17 goals in under 13 minutes a night is a good rate regardless, and 149 points in 329 career games is a genuine third-line return.

16 assists is the ceiling.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 208 pounds, which is thick — he is very difficult to knock off a puck and forechecks with real weight for his height. 16 penalty minutes.

The Intangibles

54.8 per cent of the expected goals, 86th percentile, and 52.7 per cent of the shot attempts, 79th, across 975 minutes.

The goals went 45-43, 6 short of what the chances promised, which on a club whose goaltending conceded 23 more than the shots it faced is unsurprising.

6 points in his last 10, 4 of them goals. He is 27, a third-round pick, and on a roster where every regular forward posted a top-quartile on-ice rate he is comfortably the least expensive of them.

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.

  • clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live

    4 of his 17 goals late or in overtime, 95th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it

  • durable· was available

    82 of 82 games

    Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 975 minutes

Expected goals
54.8%
87th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
52.7%
80th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 45 for, 43 against. Expected: 42.7 and 35.2.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
49th
Numbers
87th

The numbers rank him 38 points above where the report does. It was written with these numbers on screen and departs from them anyway, which makes the gap a judgment rather than an oversight. 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 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 72 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 · 82 games

Top speed
22.5 mph
65th pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
1.48 a game

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

Distance
2.07 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
94.3 mph
95th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.6

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

6

points in his last 10 games — 4 goals, 2 assists, 15 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 960 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
OTT took 54.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.8% — 0.1 below the club he did it on.
The role
Second line, 975 minutes at five-on-five — 57th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Tim Stützle57.0%53.5%52.9%
Lars Eller49.7%57.6%45.8%
Jordan Spence60.1%52.0%61.6%

57.0% together, 53.5% for him apart and 52.9% for Stützle 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

208 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 17 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 37% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.