This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Gustav Forsling
Florida Panthers Defense
A fifth-round pick Vancouver traded and Chicago waived, playing 23:26 a night on a Stanley Cup Final club.
| 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 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 318 | 36 | 86 | 122 | +69 | 108 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 635 | 5.7 | 20:02 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 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 28 assists in all 82 games — 41 points — at 23:26 a night, second on the club to Montour’s 24:08. Plus-19, 209 shots, 40 penalty minutes.
Two hundred and nine shots on goal is seventh among all defencemen in the league, and Florida placed three men in that top seven.
51.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 63rd percentile, with his ice at 78-66 against an expectation of 73.46-68.91.
The route here: 126th overall in 2014 to Vancouver, traded to Chicago before he played a game, three Chicago seasons producing 5, 13 and 9 points, traded on again, and then placed on waivers. Florida claimed him. He has since gone 17, 37 and 41 points.
Six seasons, 318 games, 122 points.
The Finesse Game
209 shots at a median of 51 feet, 3 per cent from inside twenty and 77 per cent from beyond forty — the most perimeter shot distribution of any Florida defenceman who plays.
Beyond forty: 157 shots on goal and 7 goals, 4.46 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Inside forty: 49 shots, 6 goals.
Seven goals on 157 long shots is above the rate and is still seven goals from 157 attempts. The volume is the job — he is the man who keeps the puck alive at the line — and the return on it is what this book keeps finding it to be.
98.9 mph at the 94th percentile, on seventy slap shots. That is a genuinely heavy point shot and it is the reason he takes so many of them.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 199, and forty penalty minutes in eighty-two games.
Top speed 23.1 mph, the 88th percentile; 3.22 miles a game, the 92nd. That is a fast, high-mileage reading, and it is the most distinctive thing the tracking says about any Panther defenceman.
He defends with position and stick rather than with weight. At 199 pounds against the league’s heavier forwards he gives ground in front of his own net, and Florida’s 20th-ranked expected-goals-against rate is partly a club problem and partly this.
The Intangibles
51.1 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 51st percentile.
A fifth-round pick, waived at twenty-four, playing twenty-three minutes a night three years later. The book has no metric for what changed and will not invent one; what it can record is that two organisations had him and neither found it.
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
- 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.
- durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“That is a fast, high-mileage reading, and it is the most distinctive thing the tracking says about any Panther defenceman.”
“At 199 pounds against the league's heavier forwards he gives ground in front of his own net, and Florida's 20th-ranked expected-goals-against rate is partly a club problem and partly this.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,535 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.6%
- 64th pct
- Shot attempts
- 55.6%
- 92nd pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 78 for, 66 against. Expected: 73.5 and 68.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 74 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, 2022-23 · 82 games
- Top speed
- 23.1 mph
- 95th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.43 a game
- Distance
- 3.22 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 98.9 mph
- 91st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
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
2022-23 · 1535 minutes at five-on-five
- Aaron Ekblad60%
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, 2022-23
- The club
- FLA took 53.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.6% — 2.0 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- First pair, 1,535 minutes at five-on-five — 98th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aaron Ekblad | 52.3% | 50.4% | 54.1% |
| Carter Verhaeghe | 51.4% | 51.7% | 58.9% |
| Matthew Tkachuk | 54.9% | 49.6% | 65.0% |
52.3% together, 50.4% for him apart and 54.1% for Ekblad 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
272 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 13 of them goals. His median goal came from 48 feet. 3% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 77% from beyond forty.