This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Jacob Bryson
Buffalo Sabres Defense
5-9 and 177 pounds, a 44 per cent chance share, and 622 minutes that the club could not afford.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | BUF | 38 | 1 | 8 | 9 | -1 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 24 | 4.2 | 19:03 |
| 2021-22 | BUF | 73 | 1 | 9 | 10 | -9 | 12 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 43 | 2.3 | 18:20 |
| 2022-23 | BUF | 59 | 1 | 8 | 9 | -24 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 27 | 3.7 | 14:35 |
| 2023-24 | BUF | 36 | 1 | 7 | 8 | +5 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 15 | 6.7 | 14:41 |
| 2024-25 | BUF | 48 | 0 | 7 | 7 | -9 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 0.0 | 14:24 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 254 | 4 | 39 | 43 | -38 | 50 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 129 | 3.1 | 16:19 |
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
0 goals and 7 assists in 48 games for 7 points, minus-9, on 14:24 a night.
42.6 per cent at five-on-five, the 8th percentile, over 622 minutes. His on-ice goals were 26-35 against an expected 21-28, which means five goals of finishing luck at one end were more than cancelled by seven conceded above expectation at the other.
The Finesse Game
The skating is fine and the first pass is quick, and that is the whole of the positive case. 20 shots in 48 games and no goals.
There is no offence to project and no power-play value, and a defenceman with no shot and no size has to be exceptional at defending to hold a job. He is not.
The Physical Game
5-9 and 177, one of the smallest defencemen in the league, and the size decides everything. He cannot clear a net front, cannot win a board battle against an NHL forward, and is outmuscled below the goal line every night.
10 penalty minutes over 48 games. He is not compensating with his stick, which is honest and does not help.
The Intangibles
A fourth-round pick, four years at Providence, and six seasons of being the seventh defenceman on a club that keeps not making the playoffs.
The honest projection is an American League defenceman. A club that finished 27th in chance suppression giving 622 minutes to a 10th-percentile share is not a detail; it is part of the explanation.
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.
“The skating is fine and the first pass is quick, and that is the whole of the positive case.”
“He cannot clear a net front, cannot win a board battle against an NHL forward, and is outmuscled below the goal line every night.”
“cannot win a board battle against an NHL forward”
“is outmuscled below the goal line every night”
“10 penalty minutes over 48 games. He is not compensating with his stick, which is honest and does not help.”
“a defenceman with no shot and no size has to be exceptional at defending to hold a job. He is not.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 622 minutes
- Expected goals
- 42.6%
- 8th pct
- Shot attempts
- 46.6%
- 22nd 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: 26 for, 35 against. Expected: 21.0 and 28.3.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 7 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 — 57 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 · 48 games
- Top speed
- 21.4 mph
- 40th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.54 a game
- Distance
- 2.07 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 83.0 mph
- 13th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
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 · 622 minutes at five-on-five
- Bowen Byram18%
- Owen Power17%
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
- BUF took 47.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.6% — 5.3 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third pair, 622 minutes at five-on-five — 23rd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connor Clifton | 39.0% | 44.6% | 47.7% |
| Ryan McLeod | 43.3% | 42.3% | 48.1% |
| Alex Tuch | 49.4% | 39.7% | 50.1% |
39.0% together, 44.6% for him apart and 47.7% for Clifton apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.
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
29 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 0 of them goals. 3% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 72% from beyond forty.