This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Fabian Zetterlund
San Jose Sharks Left Wing
Twenty-four years old, a hundred and eighteen shots from thirteen minutes a night, and six goals.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | NJD | 14 | 3 | 5 | 8 | +5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 36 | 8.3 | 13:21 |
| 2022-23 | NJD/SJS | 67 | 6 | 17 | 23 | -6 | 14 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 118 | 5.1 | 13:15 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 81 | 9 | 22 | 31 | -1 | 14 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 154 | 5.8 | 13:16 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 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
6 goals and 17 assists in 67 games — 23 points — at 13:15 a night between New Jersey and San Jose. Minus-6, 118 shots at 5.1 per cent, one on the power play, one game-winner, 14 penalty minutes.
49.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 827 minutes, the 43rd percentile, with his ice at 32-34 against an expectation of 35.87-36.26.
He started 46.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 32nd percentile.
A hundred and eighteen shots in thirteen minutes a night is a very high rate, and it is the one thing in this file that is unambiguously his own: only four San Jose forwards took more, and every one of them played at least two minutes a night more than he did.
The Finesse Game
118 shots at a median of 32 feet, with 45 per cent of his attempts from between twenty and forty feet.
Inside twenty feet: 27 shots on goal and two goals — 7.41 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 47 shots and four goals, 8.51 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 37 shots and none.
Below the rate at all three distances and a 5.1 per cent shooting percentage. Some of that is a twenty-three-year-old finding out how much harder NHL goaltenders are, and a good deal of it is where he shoots from: only 23 per cent of his attempts came from inside twenty feet, which for a winger with no established scoring record is the wrong distribution.
166 tracked attempts, 45 of them snap shots — a 27.1 per cent share, the thirteenth-highest of the 319 skaters in this book who took a hundred and fifty attempts — and 25 slap. He is a shooter by instinct who has not yet learned to wait.
93.3 mph at the 66th percentile. The shot is real; the selection is not there yet.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 208 pounds, which is heavy for the height and shows in the way he plays.
Top speed 22.5 mph at the 64th percentile, 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 58th, 2.18 miles a game at the 23rd.
He wins the wall by leaning on people, which at 208 pounds on a third line is the part of his game that is already an NHL habit.
14 penalty minutes in 67 games. He is heavy without being nasty, and the contact is all in pursuit of the puck.
The Intangibles
Sixty-third overall in 2017, the third round, two seasons, 81 games, 31 points across New Jersey and San Jose.
He was traded in the deal that sent Timo Meier the other way, which puts a specific weight on this file: San Jose gave up a forty-goal winger and this is one of the players it received.
He is twenty-four, and 23 points in 67 games at 13:15 is neither encouraging nor discouraging. What the shot chart says is that the volume instinct is real and the shot selection is not, and those are two different problems with two different timescales.
On this roster he will get the minutes to sort it out.
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
- 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.
- perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
32.7% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 96th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
“He wins the wall by leaning on people, which at 208 pounds on a third line is the part of his game that is already an NHL habit.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 827 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.7%
- 50th pct
- Shot attempts
- 50.4%
- 56th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 32 for, 34 against. Expected: 35.9 and 36.3.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 16 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 69 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, 2022-23 · 67 games
- Top speed
- 22.5 mph
- 70th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.07 a game
- Distance
- 2.18 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.3 mph
- 84th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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
2022-23 with NJD · 546 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, 2022-23
- The club
- SJS took 48.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.7% — 1.2 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 827 minutes at five-on-five — 42nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dougie Hamilton | 55.7% | 47.8% | 55.9% |
| Tomas Tatar | 62.1% | 45.9% | 62.1% |
| Jonas Siegenthaler | 55.1% | 48.2% | 55.3% |
55.7% together, 47.8% for him apart and 55.9% for Hamilton apart. He was worse away from Hamilton, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Hamilton did.
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
159 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 23% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 33% from beyond forty.