Ivan Demidov

A rookie with 62 points who was already the most creative player on the ice most nights.

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

2024-25	MTL	2	1	1	2	+1	0	0	0	0	5	20.0	13:43
2025-26	MTL	82	19	43	62	+3	34	7	0	4	127	15.0	15:30
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	84	20	44	64	+4	34	7	0	4	132	15.2	15:27

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

19 goals and 43 assists in all 82 games for 62 points, on 15 and a half minutes a night — the least ice time of anyone in the top 6. 7 power-play goals. He played 78 percent of his 5-on-5 minutes with Kapanen on what was nominally a third line and did not play like one.

The Finesse Game

The hands are the reason he went 5th overall and they are the real thing. He beats defencemen one-on-one in tight spaces, he delays and drags pucks through sticks, and he sees passes that his linemates have not thought of yet — which occasionally means the pass is not received, and will stop meaning that as they get used to him.

The shot is quick and accurate without being heavy. Most of his goals come from the inner slot after he has made somebody miss.

He generated 62 points on the fourth-most ice time among the club’s forwards, which is the number that matters. Give him 20 minutes and top-line linemates and the totals go somewhere else entirely.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 192, and still filling out. He is not afraid of the middle of the ice but he loses puck battles to grown defencemen and gets rubbed out along the wall. That will change with strength; it is the normal rookie tax.

The Intangibles

He came out of Russia with a reputation as the most skilled player in his draft class, and the first NHL season did nothing to argue with it.

There is genuine star potential here — the kind that changes what a franchise can aim at. The only projection worth making is that the ice time is going up.

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
82 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 · 950 minutes

Expected goals: 49.6%; 52nd pct
Shot attempts: 45.2%; 13th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 53 for, 46 against. Expected: 41.5 and 42.2.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

86th

Numbers

52nd

The report ranks him 34 points above where the numbers do. 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 — 79 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 58th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.89 a game
Distance: 2.53 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.1 mph; 84th 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 — 4 goals, 3 assists, 21 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 950 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: MTL took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.6% — 0.2 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 950 minutes at five-on-five — 54th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Oliver Kapanen	48.6%	55.4%	34.1%
Juraj Slafkovský	49.7%	49.5%	51.3%
Lane Hutson	51.6%	47.7%	56.9%

48.6% together, 55.4% for him apart and 34.1% for Kapanen apart. He was carrying it: the share stayed with him and left Kapanen 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

205 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 21 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 28% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.