Jeff Skinner

1,078 games and 699 points, and a season in Edmonton that ended with 13 minutes a night and a buyout.

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

2010-11	CAR	82	31	32	63	+3	46	6	0	2	215	14.4	16:44
2011-12	CAR	64	20	24	44	-8	56	4	0	5	210	9.5	18:37
2012-13	CAR	42	13	11	24	-21	26	5	0	0	159	8.2	18:28
2013-14	CAR	71	33	21	54	-14	22	11	0	6	274	12.0	17:12
2014-15	CAR	77	18	13	31	-24	18	4	0	2	235	7.7	16:03
2015-16	CAR	82	28	23	51	-2	38	4	0	7	258	10.8	16:17
2016-17	CAR	79	37	26	63	-3	28	7	0	4	281	13.2	17:44
2017-18	CAR	82	24	25	49	-27	34	4	0	2	277	8.7	16:42
2018-19	BUF	82	40	23	63	0	36	8	0	7	268	14.9	18:31
2019-20	BUF	59	14	9	23	-22	18	0	0	1	183	7.6	16:29
2020-21	BUF	53	7	7	14	-11	14	1	0	0	111	6.3	14:31
2021-22	BUF	80	33	30	63	-14	42	5	0	4	262	12.6	17:06
2022-23	BUF	79	35	47	82	+15	39	8	0	3	242	14.5	17:24
2023-24	BUF	74	24	22	46	-2	34	8	0	3	211	11.4	16:00
2024-25	EDM	72	16	13	29	+1	26	0	0	1	144	11.1	13:00
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	1078	373	326	699	-129	477	75	0	47	3330	11.2	16:43

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

16 goals and 13 assists in 72 games for Edmonton — 29 points at 13:00 a night, plus-1, with no power-play goals on 144 shots.

It is the least productive full season of his career and the fewest minutes he has played since he was a rookie. Edmonton signed him as a free agent, could not find a line for him, and bought out the contract in the summer.

The Finesse Game

144 attempts and 16 goals at 11.1 per cent. The shot and the release are still genuinely good — he scored 40 goals in 2018-19 and 35 in 2022-23 — and what has gone is everything around it.

13 assists in 72 games. He has never been a passer; the whole value has always been the finishing, and a 40-goal scorer at 13 minutes a night on the fourth line is a player nobody knows how to use.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 200 and he is not in the physical half of the game at all. He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and he never has.

26 penalty minutes in 72 games. The defensive detail has been the criticism for fifteen years and it is the reason a club with a good centre depth chart could not fit him in.

The Intangibles

Seventh overall in 2010, a Calder Trophy at 18, 1,078 games and 699 points, and one of the most productive goal-scorers of his generation.

He has played more games without appearing in a playoff series than almost anybody in league history — a streak that ended in Edmonton last spring at 32. He is 33, San Jose signed him in the summer, and on a club with two teenaged centres a finisher is worth trying.

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
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.

clutch· scored his goals when the game was still live
3 of his 16 goals late or in overtime, 91st percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and he never has.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and he never has.”
defensively-responsiblehe lacks it· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“The defensive detail has been the criticism for fifteen years and it is the reason a club with a good centre depth chart could not fit him in.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“He has never been a passer; the whole value has always been the finishing, and a 40-goal scorer at 13 minutes a night on the fourth line is a player nobody knows how to use.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 802 minutes

Expected goals: 50.3%; 56th pct
Shot attempts: 51.5%; 70th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 30 for, 31 against. Expected: 34.4 and 34.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

21st

Numbers

56th

The numbers rank him 35 points above where the report does. 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 — 67 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 · 72 games

Top speed: 22.0 mph; 37th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.60 a game
Distance: 2.08 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.3 mph; 80th 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 with EDM · 802 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: EDM took 54.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.3% — 4.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: 802 minutes at five-on-five — 36th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Brett Kulak	43.5%	54.1%	56.5%
Darnell Nurse	53.4%	48.4%	53.7%
Adam Henrique	44.5%	53.7%	47.7%

43.5% together, 54.1% for him apart and 56.5% for Kulak 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

197 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 16 of them goals. His median goal came from 8 feet. 41% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.