Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

8

Henry Thrun

Toronto Maple Leafs Defense

Minus-23 in 60 games on the worst club in the league, and a career minus-48 in 119.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2022-23SJS8022-3000070.019:52
2023-24SJS513811-2216200486.320:00
2024-25SJS6021012-2330000523.917:31
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—11952025-48462001074.718:44

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

2 goals and 10 assists in 60 games for San Jose — 12 points at 17:31 a night, minus-23, with 30 penalty minutes.

San Jose finished last in the league in both goals for and goals against, so a minus-23 from a second-pairing defenceman there is close to unreadable. What the season does establish is that he played seventeen and a half minutes a night on a club that had nobody else.

The Finesse Game

52 attempts in 60 games and 2 goals. There is no shot: 25 points in 119 career NHL games.

10 assists. The skating and the first pass are the reason he plays — he escapes a forecheck by turning away from it and he is comfortable carrying the puck through the neutral zone, which on San Jose’s blue line was a scarce commodity.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 211 and honest without being heavy. He blocks shots and he defends positionally, and he does not clear the front of his own net by force.

30 penalty minutes in 60 games is a moderate rate. He is not physical by instinct and the edge is not part of the appeal.

The Intangibles

A fourth-round pick of Anaheim in 2019 out of Harvard, who did not sign there and became a free agent — San Jose signed him in 2023.

119 games and 25 points. He is 24 and Toronto acquired him in the summer for a fourth-round pick, which on a blue line whose regulars are 31, 34, 32, 35 and 28 is a sensible thing to own.

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.

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “he escapes a forecheck by turning away from it and he is comfortable carrying the puck through the neutral zone, which on San Jose's blue line was a scarce commodity.”

  • shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it

    “He blocks shots and he defends positionally, and he does not clear the front of his own net by force.”

  • clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net

    “He blocks shots and he defends positionally, and he does not clear the front of his own net by force.”

  • nastyhe lacks it· hard to play against; the edge is the point

    “He is not physical by instinct and the edge is not part of the appeal.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 887 minutes

Expected goals
39%
2nd pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
42.2%
4th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 28 for, 48 against. Expected: 27.1 and 42.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
21st
Numbers
2nd

The 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 67 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
21.2 mph
28th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6

Bursts over 20 mph
0.33 a game

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

Distance
2.35 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
92.2 mph
64th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 89.7

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 with SJS · 887 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
SJS took 44.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 39.0% — 5.2 below the club he did it on.
The role
Third pair, 887 minutes at five-on-five — 43rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
William Eklund48.0%35.6%50.5%
Fabian Zetterlund41.4%38.1%45.7%
Macklin Celebrini43.9%37.3%51.4%

48.0% together, 35.6% for him apart and 50.5% for Eklund apart. He was worse away from Eklund, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Eklund did.

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

71 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 40 feet. 4% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 79% from beyond forty.