This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Jason Zucker

53 points at 33 and 11 power-play goals on a unit that finished 24th.

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 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	770	217	206	423	+1	394	45	3	34	1744	12.4	15:31

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

21 goals and 32 assists in 73 games for 53 points, plus-4, on 16:00 a night, with 11 of the goals on the power play — more than a third of the club’s total.

48.6 per cent at five-on-five, the 39th percentile. 14.7 per cent shooting from a median of 22 feet with 47 per cent of attempts inside 20, which is a sustainable profile and one of the few on this roster.

The Finesse Game

A net-front and inside-lane scorer who has never needed to carry the puck to be useful. The release is quick in traffic and he is very good at finding the open ice at the top of the crease on a power play — 11 goals there is not an accident of usage.

The playmaking is functional rather than creative. What he provides is a veteran who goes to the right places and does not need the play designed around him.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 198, and he plays hard for the size. He forechecks with real intent, goes into the corners, and stands in front of a goaltender on the power play.

57 penalty minutes at 33 is a high total and reflects a player who plays right at the edge. The body has cost him time repeatedly across his career, including two seasons largely lost.

The Intangibles

Thirteen seasons, five organisations, and a career of arriving somewhere as a stopgap and outplaying the expectation. He has been genuinely good in three of the last four years.

At 33 on a club that keeps not making the playoffs, he is the most obviously tradeable veteran on the roster. That the club kept him is a statement about how it sees this season.

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
ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

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.

net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“A net-front and inside-lane scorer who has never needed to carry the puck to be useful.”
playmakerpresent and ordinary· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“The playmaking is functional rather than creative.”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks with real intent, goes into the corners, and stands in front of a goaltender on the power play.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“goes into the corners”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“57 penalty minutes at 33 is a high total and reflects a player who plays right at the edge.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 858 minutes

Expected goals: 48.6%; 40th pct
Shot attempts: 48.5%; 38th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 49 for, 40 against. Expected: 36.0 and 38.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

80th

Numbers

40th

The report ranks him 40 points above where the numbers do. 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. 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 78 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 · 73 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 56th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.74 a game
Distance: 2.40 miles a game
Hardest shot: 86.5 mph; 56th 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.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 858 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, 2024-25

The club: BUF took 47.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.6% — 0.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 858 minutes at five-on-five — 41st percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Bowen Byram	51.1%	46.9%	48.0%
Alex Tuch	42.7%	52.2%	53.6%
Ryan McLeod	48.9%	48.5%	46.2%

51.1% together, 46.9% for him apart and 48.0% for Byram 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

223 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 21 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 47% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.