This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Jason Zucker

Twenty-seven goals at thirty-one, and the best five-on-five share of any forward on the club he left.

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 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	628	182	156	338	+6	256	29	3	30	1451	12.5	15:39

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

27 goals and 21 assists in 78 games for Pittsburgh — 48 points at 15:39 a night, minus-4, with 5 game-winners on 197 shots, converting at 13.71 per cent, and 47 penalty minutes.

55.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,105 minutes, the 89th percentile — by a distance the best number anybody on this roster brought with them. His ice went 54-56 against an expectation of 59.85-47.99, which is eight more goals conceded than the chances predicted and is Pittsburgh’s goaltending rather than his defending.

The Finesse Game

197 attempts at a median of 19 feet with 52 per cent from inside 20 and 14 per cent from beyond 40, off a 94.8 mph shot at the 76th percentile.

He is a shooter who shoots from where goals are scored and he is hard enough to beat a goaltender when he gets there. 182 goals in 628 games. The passing is the ordinary part — 156 career assists against 182 goals — and he is not the man who creates the play.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 198, built low, and he goes to the net and stays there. 256 penalty minutes in 628 games.

The skating is good and still is at 31: 22.7 mph at the 72nd percentile with 1.7 bursts a game at the 78th. He forechecks hard and he arrives on the puck, which is what has kept him a top-nine winger for twelve years.

The Intangibles

Fifty-ninth overall in 2010, twelve seasons, 628 games, 338 points and a reputation as one of the more decent men in the sport — he and his wife have raised a great deal of money for children’s hospitals.

He is 31, arriving on a club that will not make the playoffs, after a season that says he can still play on one that would. He is the most obvious deadline asset Arizona has, and the value of the season is whatever a contender pays for him in March.

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
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.

durable· was available
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
69% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 99th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks hard and he arrives on the puck”
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He is a shooter who shoots from where goals are scored and he is hard enough to beat a goaltender when he gets there.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“The passing is the ordinary part — 156 career assists against 182 goals — and he is not the man who creates the play.”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“he and his wife have raised a great deal of money for children's hospitals”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,105 minutes

Expected goals: 55.5%; 89th pct
Shot attempts: 55.4%; 92nd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 54 for, 56 against. Expected: 59.9 and 48.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

76th

Numbers

89th

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 58 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 65 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

2022-23 with PIT · 1105 minutes at five-on-five

Evgeni Malkin82%
Bryan Rust43%
Rickard Rakell39%

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, 2022-23

The club: PIT took 53.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.5% — 2.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,105 minutes at five-on-five — 71st percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Evgeni Malkin	55.6%	54.7%	51.1%
Bryan Rust	59.9%	52.3%	49.0%
Rickard Rakell	50.2%	59.0%	57.1%

55.6% together, 54.7% for him apart and 51.1% for Malkin apart. Malkin was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Malkin 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

277 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 27 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 52% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.