Jason Zucker

34 years old, 24 goals, and the second-shortest average shot in the league.

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

2011-12	MIN	6	0	2	2	-2	2	0	0	0	10	0.0	11:02
2012-13	MIN	20	4	1	5	+4	8	0	0	0	34	11.8	11:16
2013-14	MIN	21	4	1	5	+2	2	1	0	1	40	10.0	12:59
2014-15	MIN	51	21	5	26	-9	18	1	1	3	124	16.9	15:04
2015-16	MIN	71	13	10	23	-4	20	0	1	1	158	8.2	15:35
2016-17	MIN	79	22	25	47	+34	30	1	0	3	172	12.8	15:17
2017-18	MIN	82	33	31	64	+8	44	7	1	7	222	14.9	16:58
2018-19	MIN	81	21	21	42	-9	28	7	0	5	214	9.8	17:05
2019-20	MIN/PIT	60	20	21	41	-4	21	7	0	4	111	18.0	16:20
2020-21	PIT	38	9	9	18	-8	21	1	0	1	67	13.4	15:41
2021-22	PIT	41	8	9	17	-2	15	2	0	0	102	7.8	14:49
2022-23	PIT	78	27	21	48	-4	47	2	0	5	197	13.7	15:39
2023-24	ARI/NSH	69	14	18	32	-9	81	5	0	0	150	9.3	13:49
2024-25	BUF	73	21	32	53	+4	57	11	0	4	143	14.7	16:00
2025-26	BUF	62	24	21	45	-5	23	10	0	7	128	18.8	15:37
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	832	241	227	468	-4	417	55	3	41	1872	12.9	15:31

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

24 goals and 21 assists in 62 games — 45 points, minus-5, at 15:37 a night. 10 of the goals came on the power play. It was his fifteenth NHL season.

The Finesse Game

The shot chart is the report. The median unblocked attempt of his season came from 14 feet, and 62 per cent came from inside 20. Only Benson stands closer.

That is how a 34-year-old scores 24 goals on 128 shots. The speed that made him a 33-goal scorer in Minnesota has faded a step, and he replaced it by simply refusing to shoot from anywhere that does not work. It is the most instructive page on this roster for the young wingers around him.

The playmaking was never the strength — 227 assists against 241 goals in 832 games — and it is not now.

The Physical Game

5-11, 198, and he goes to the net front knowing what happens there. 23 penalty minutes says he takes it rather than gives it.

At his age the ability to keep arriving in that ice is the thing that will go first, and when it does the goals go with it.

The Intangibles

The 5-on-5 numbers held up better than the minus-5 suggests: 52.6 per cent of the expected goals, 70th percentile, in 746 minutes.

8 points in his last 10. He is a veteran on a young team who is still one of its 3 best finishers, and he is doing it by knowing exactly where to stand. There is no mystery here and no decline visible yet.

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.

slot-man· shoots from where goals are scored
69.6% of his attempts in the slot, 95th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.69) · 44% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 746 minutes

Expected goals: 52.6%; 75th pct
Shot attempts: 48.9%; 45th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 38 for, 32 against. Expected: 35.9 and 32.3.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

61st

Numbers

75th

The two rank him within 14 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

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 — 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, 2025-26 · 62 games

Top speed: 21.9 mph; 34th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.71 a game
Distance: 2.36 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.2 mph; 39th 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, 4 assists, 22 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 746 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: BUF took 51.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.6% — 1.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 746 minutes at five-on-five — 34th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jack Quinn	53.6%	48.8%	47.1%
Ryan McLeod	54.0%	49.8%	52.0%
Rasmus Dahlin	55.6%	50.4%	53.9%

53.6% together, 48.8% for him apart and 47.1% for Quinn apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

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

191 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 24 of them goals. His median goal came from 11 feet. 62% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.