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.

Gage Goncalves

Photo by TheAHL, CC BY 2.0

Gage Goncalves

Tampa Bay Lightning Center #93

The 95th percentile, plus 26, and 13 minutes a night.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2023-24TBL2000060000—9:58
2024-25TBL6081220+7141016113.112:48
2025-26TBL74112233+26410027714.313:05
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—136193453+336110313813.812:55

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

11 goals and 22 assists in 74 games — 33 points, plus-26, at 13:05 a night with 41 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

The shot chart is very good. 115 unblocked attempts, 14 goals, median 19 feet with 52 per cent from inside 20 and only 13 per cent from beyond 40.

14 goals from 115 attempts is an excellent conversion and it came in 13 minutes a night.

22 assists is a genuine rate for the ice. 53 points in 136 career games.

The Physical Game

6-1, 189, and willing rather than heavy. 41 penalty minutes in 13 minutes a night is a high rate.

He forechecks properly and goes to the interior, which is why the shot chart looks the way it does.

The Intangibles

56.9 per cent of the expected goals, 95th percentile, and 53.0 per cent of the shot attempts, 81st, across 871 minutes, with the chances 37.8 to 28.6 in his favour and the goals 59-35.

That is the third-best chance share among Tampa’s forwards, behind Hagel and Kucherov, from a third-line role.

6 points in his last 10, none of them goals. He is 25, a 62nd overall pick, and precisely the kind of cheap, effective, entirely unknown middle-6 forward that this organisation has produced for a decade and other clubs cannot seem to find.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 871 minutes

Expected goals
56.9%
95th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
53%
81st pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 59 for, 35 against. Expected: 37.8 and 28.6.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
73rd
Numbers
95th

The numbers rank him 22 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 — 76 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 · 74 games

Top speed
23.3 mph
93rd pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
0.54 a game

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

Distance
2.09 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
84.2 mph
46th 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 — 0 goals, 6 assists, 15 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 871 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
TBL took 53.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.9% — 3.0 above the club he did it on.
The role
Third line, 871 minutes at five-on-five — 45th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Brayden Point59.0%55.7%51.1%
Charle-Edouard D'Astous63.0%54.0%53.3%
Jake Guentzel53.7%58.4%54.4%

59.0% together, 55.7% for him apart and 51.1% for Point 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

115 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 14 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 53% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.