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

Gage Goncalves

Twenty points in a first full season, and the ice he was on conceded five fewer goals than the chances predicted.

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

2023-24	TBL	2	0	0	0	0	6	0	0	0	0	—	9:58
2024-25	TBL	60	8	12	20	+7	14	1	0	1	61	13.1	12:48
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	62	8	12	20	+7	20	1	0	1	61	13.1	12:43

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

8 goals and 12 assists in 60 games — 20 points at 12:48 a night, plus-7, with 14 penalty minutes on 61 shots. They were effectively his first NHL games.

47.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 44th percentile, across 682 minutes. His ice went 26-23 against an expectation of 23.95-26.68 — twelve goals better than expected for and five fewer against, on a fourth line.

The Finesse Game

61 attempts at a median of 27 feet with 39 per cent from inside 20, converting at 13.1 per cent.

12 assists in 60 games at under thirteen minutes a night is a promising rate. He handles the puck well in a small space and he supports it low, and the offensive game is more advanced than a fourth-line assignment suggests.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 189 and honest without being heavy. He forechecks properly and he is not going to move a defenceman off a puck.

14 penalty minutes in 60 games is a low rate. He is disciplined and he is used on the penalty kill, which for a first-year forward on a club with these expectations means something.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2020 who spent four full seasons in the American League — a long apprenticeship even by this organisation’s standards.

62 NHL games and 20 points. He is 24 and a useful bottom-six forward on a club that has very little cheap depth.

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.

playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“He handles the puck well in a small space and he supports it low, and the offensive game is more advanced than a fourth-line assignment suggests.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He is disciplined and he is used on the penalty kill, which for a first-year forward on a club with these expectations means something.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He forechecks properly and he is not going to move a defenceman off a puck.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 682 minutes

Expected goals: 47.3%; 29th pct
Shot attempts: 49.1%; 44th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 26 for, 23 against. Expected: 23.9 and 26.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

49th

Numbers

29th

The report ranks him 20 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 — 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, 2024-25 · 60 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 55th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.93 a game
Distance: 2.09 miles a game
Hardest shot: 82.6 mph; 31st 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 · 682 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: TBL took 50.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.3% — 3.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 682 minutes at five-on-five — 27th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nick Paul	51.1%	44.8%	46.1%
Victor Hedman	48.8%	46.4%	53.7%
Darren Raddysh	46.6%	47.6%	52.1%

51.1% together, 44.8% for him apart and 46.1% for Paul 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

88 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 28 feet. 39% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 27% from beyond forty.