Armchair Hockey Scout Beta

This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

21

Jason Robertson

Dallas Stars Left Wing

Eighty points and the 96th percentile of chances, from a second-round pick with a career 14.86 per cent finishing rate.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2019-20DAL30110000040.012:19
2020-21DAL51172845+131610312713.416:53
2021-22DAL74413879+16221301122018.618:07
2022-23DAL824663109+3720130731314.718:50
2023-24DAL82295180+192290423112.618:19
2024-25 so far
Career292133181314+85803602589514.918:06

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

All 82 games, 29 goals and 51 assists for 80 points with 9 on the power play, 18:19 a night and plus-19. He converted 12.55 per cent of 231 shots against a career 14.86 across 895.

He took 57.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,203 minutes, the 96th percentile, and his ice went 47-49 against an expectation of 52.94-39.19. Six goals of scoring missing and ten extra against — the worst gap on the club, on the man with the best chance share among its forwards. It is the single strangest set of numbers in this chapter and it says nothing bad about him.

The Finesse Game

He handles the puck in traffic and protects it at 6-3, and the whole game is played at a walking pace that somehow arrives first. He is not fast and it has never mattered.

One hundred and eighty-one assists in 292 career games is a first-line playmaking rate sitting on top of 133 goals, and 51 last season is the higher of his two numbers for the first time. He sees the far-side seam before the defence has closed it.

Two hundred and thirty-one shots from a median of 31 feet with 33 per cent from inside 20. A career 14.86 per cent across 895 shots is an elite finishing rate and the 12.55 last season is the outlier.

The Physical Game

He is 6-3 and 204 and wins the wall by leaning rather than by hitting. Twenty-two penalty minutes in 82 games is a low rate.

He does not finish checks and does not forecheck hard. The puck is retrieved by being in the right place when it arrives, which works and does not look like work.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick, 39th overall in 2017 out of Arcadia, California, who reached the National Hockey League at 21 and has 314 points in 292 games since. He is plus-85 across all of them.

He is 25 and the best forward on the club with the second-most points in the league, and almost nobody outside Texas would name him among the ten best wingers in hockey.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 1,203 minutes

Expected goals
57.5%
96th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
55.8%
92nd pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 47 for, 49 against. Expected: 52.9 and 39.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
83rd
Numbers
96th

The two rank him within 13 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 201 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 72 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.

Usual linemates

2023-24 · 1203 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, 2023-24

The club
DAL took 54.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 57.5% — 2.9 above the club he did it on.
The role
First line, 1,203 minutes at five-on-five — 83rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Roope Hintz57.9%55.8%48.0%
Joe Pavelski54.1%66.0%50.6%
Thomas Harley59.7%56.1%52.7%

57.9% together, 55.8% for him apart and 48.0% for Hintz apart. Hintz was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Hintz than for him.

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

326 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 33 of them goals. His median goal came from 19 feet. 33% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 31% from beyond forty.