Photo by LHC1976, CC BY-SA 4.0

Gustav Forsling

a 126th overall, 22 and a half minutes a night, and 2 goals.

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

2016-17	CHI	38	2	3	5	+3	4	0	0	0	48	4.2	14:49
2017-18	CHI	41	3	10	13	-2	8	1	0	1	82	3.7	19:09
2018-19	CHI	43	3	6	9	-9	30	0	0	0	57	5.3	17:05
2020-21	FLA	43	5	12	17	+17	8	1	0	0	94	5.3	19:57
2021-22	FLA	71	10	27	37	+41	18	0	0	1	145	6.9	21:13
2022-23	FLA	82	13	28	41	+19	40	1	0	3	209	6.2	23:26
2023-24	FLA	79	10	29	39	+56	43	1	0	1	160	6.3	22:09
2024-25	FLA	80	11	20	31	+33	16	0	1	1	195	5.6	22:57
2025-26	FLA	80	2	26	28	-5	51	0	0	1	112	1.8	22:38
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	557	59	161	220	+153	218	4	1	8	1102	5.3	21:07

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

2 goals and 26 assists in 80 games — 28 points, minus-5, at 22:38 a night with 1,458 5-on-5 minutes, the most on the club.

The Finesse Game

Almost no shooting and a great deal of skating. 166 unblocked attempts from a median of 54 feet, 4 per cent inside 20, and 2 goals — he is not a scorer and the club does not want him to be one.

What he does is leave the defensive zone with the puck. The first pass is quick and the feet make it possible under a forecheck that has taken away the easy option.

The Physical Game

6-1, 199, and he defends with position and stick rather than force. 51 penalty minutes across a full season of the hardest minutes available.

He is not clearing his crease against a heavy winger, and on a club whose goaltending was the league’s worst that mattered more than it should have.

The Intangibles

52.4 per cent of the expected goals, 73rd percentile, and 53.4 per cent of the shot attempts, 83rd — respectable figures in the most minutes on the club, against the other team’s best.

a 126th overall pick who was waived by 2 organisations before Florida claimed him, and who has since played the toughest minutes on 2 Stanley Cup teams. That is one of the great scouting stories of the decade and almost nobody outside the state knows his name.

The goals went 65-72 against him, 13 short of chances that were 6 to the good — the second-largest shortfall on the club. He is 30.

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

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.

durable· was available
80 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,458 minutes

Expected goals: 52.4%; 74th pct
Shot attempts: 53.4%; 83rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 65 for, 72 against. Expected: 64.7 and 58.7.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

67th

Numbers

74th

The two rank him within 7 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

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 — 75 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 · 80 games

Top speed: 23.3 mph; 97th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.93 a game
Distance: 3.04 miles a game
Hardest shot: 100.4 mph; 97th 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 0 goals, 3 assists, 21 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1458 minutes at five-on-five

Aaron Ekblad73%

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: FLA took 50.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.4% — 2.0 above the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,458 minutes at five-on-five — 95th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Aaron Ekblad	51.4%	55.3%	42.9%
Eetu Luostarinen	55.0%	51.3%	49.6%
Carter Verhaeghe	51.6%	52.8%	51.9%

51.4% together, 55.3% for him apart and 42.9% for Ekblad apart. He was carrying it: the share stayed with him and left Ekblad behind.

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

166 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 40 feet. 4% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 78% from beyond forty.