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

Frank Nazar

12 goals in 53 games at 21, and the second-most important forward in the organisation.

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

2023-24	CHI	3	1	0	1	-4	0	0	0	0	2	50.0	16:09
2024-25	CHI	53	12	14	26	-11	24	1	1	2	91	13.2	15:52
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	56	13	14	27	-15	24	1	1	2	93	14.0	15:53

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

12 goals and 14 assists in 53 games for 26 points, minus-11, on 15:52 a night in his first NHL season, with a shorthanded goal.

42.7 per cent at five-on-five, the 8th percentile — which is a team number as much as a personal one. 91 shots in 53 games is a good volume for a rookie and 13.2 per cent is a fair rate.

The Finesse Game

The skating is the standout and it is genuinely elite — explosive from a standstill, and he changes direction at full speed without losing any of it. That is the tool that separates him from most 21-year-olds.

40 per cent of his attempts came from inside 20 feet, so he is already getting to the right places. The hands work at his own pace, which is the harder test, and the passing is good without yet being a weapon. He is a driver rather than a finisher.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 190, and he competes far harder than the frame suggests. He forechecks with force, goes into corners, and is difficult to knock off a puck for his size.

24 penalty minutes over 53 games. The strength will come and nothing about the game depends on it arriving.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick, a national-championship winner at Michigan, and a rookie season on the worst team in the conference in which he never looked out of place.

He is the player most likely to make Connor Bedard’s minutes survivable. The projection is a genuine second-line centre or a first-line winger, and the club needs him to be one of those quickly.

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

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.

forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks with force, goes into corners, and is difficult to knock off a puck for his size.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“He forechecks with force, goes into corners, and is difficult to knock off a puck for his size.”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“is difficult to knock off a puck for his size”
edgesa strength· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“he changes direction at full speed without losing any of it”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 651 minutes

Expected goals: 42.7%; 8th pct
Shot attempts: 42%; 3rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 23 for, 30 against. Expected: 22.4 and 30.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

84th

Numbers

8th

The report ranks him 76 points above where the numbers do. 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 — 79 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 · 53 games

Top speed: 23.1 mph; 87th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.75 a game
Distance: 2.68 miles a game
Hardest shot: 85.5 mph; 49th 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

2024-25 · 651 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: CHI took 43.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.7% — 0.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: 651 minutes at five-on-five — 24th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Connor Bedard	41.6%	43.7%	41.8%
Tyler Bertuzzi	42.6%	42.9%	40.4%
Alex Vlasic	44.4%	42.0%	42.4%

41.6% together, 43.7% for him apart and 41.8% for Bedard apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

134 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 13 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 41% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.