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.

77

Filip Chytil

Vancouver Canucks Center

Acquired in the January trade, and a 26-year-old centre whose career has been interrupted by four concussions.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2017-18NYR9123-54000214.813:37
2018-19NYR75111223-2283021338.313:47
2019-20NYR6014923-71010211412.314:50
2020-21NYR4281422+9100007610.513:14
2021-22NYR6781422-1140011355.913:11
2022-23NYR74222345+153030417712.414:41
2023-24NYR1006604000220.015:56
2024-25NYR/VAN56131326-7181011339.814:58
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—3937793170-189880108119.514:10

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

13 goals and 13 assists in 56 games across New York and Vancouver — 26 points at 14:58 a night, minus-7, with 18 penalty minutes on 133 shots.

52.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 69th percentile. His ice went 28-29 against an expectation of 35.13-31.78 — eleven goals of scoring missing, which on a club that was 30th at creating chances is the shape of the whole roster.

The Finesse Game

133 attempts at a median of 24 feet with 39 per cent from inside 20, converting at 9.8 per cent.

The skating is the asset — he is among the faster centres here and he carries the puck through the neutral zone at speed. 13 assists in 56 games is thin, and he has never been a distributor; he is a straight-line player who gets to the net.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 210 and he plays honestly without being punishing. He forechecks properly and he does not finish many checks.

18 penalty minutes in 56 games. He is disciplined, and given that he has lost most of two seasons to concussions the caution is not a criticism.

The Intangibles

Twenty-first overall in 2017 and 393 games and 170 points, seven seasons of it with the Rangers, where he scored two of the more memorable playoff goals of that era.

He was traded to Vancouver in January with Victor Mancini and a first-round pick for J.T. Miller. He is 26, and a club that has just spent a year at war with itself acquired him to be its second-line centre.

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.

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

    “**The skating is the asset** — he is among the faster centres here and he carries the puck through the neutral zone at speed.”

  • playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “13 assists in 56 games is thin, and he has never been a distributor; he is a straight-line player who gets to the net.”

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

    “He forechecks properly and he does not finish many checks.”

  • punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally

    “6-2 and 210 and he plays honestly without being punishing.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 737 minutes

Expected goals
52.5%
74th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
50.9%
63rd pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 28 for, 29 against. Expected: 35.1 and 31.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
55th
Numbers
74th

The two rank him within 19 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 — 73 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 · 56 games

Top speed
23.2 mph
91st pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
3.29 a game

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

Distance
2.67 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
86.7 mph
57th 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 with NYR · 534 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
VAN took 49.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.5% — 3.4 above the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 737 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Will Cuylle52.8%52.3%45.1%
Kaapo Kakko54.1%51.8%46.1%
Braden Schneider43.7%55.5%46.8%

52.8% together, 52.3% for him apart and 45.1% for Cuylle apart. Cuylle was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Cuylle than for him.

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

192 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 13 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 39% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.