Jiri Kulich

15 goals in 62 games at 21, on the second-best chance share of any forward here.

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

2023-24	BUF	1	0	0	0	-1	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	14:53
2024-25	BUF	62	15	9	24	-4	18	0	0	3	134	11.2	14:48
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	63	15	9	24	-5	18	0	0	3	135	11.1	14:48

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

15 goals and 9 assists in 62 games for 24 points, minus-4, on 14:48 a night in his first NHL season.

49.8 per cent at five-on-five, the 50th percentile, with on-ice goals of 39-37 against an expected 32-32. 134 shots in 62 games is a high volume for a rookie in these minutes, and 11.2 per cent conversion is a fair rate.

The Finesse Game

A shooter. The release is quick and he is willing to use it, which is why a 21-year-old in fourteen minutes a night took more shots than several regulars. 15 goals in a rookie season on this club is a genuine result.

The playmaking is the missing half — 9 assists in 62 games — and the puck skills under pressure are still developing. He is a finisher who needs a centre, and Buffalo is a club with three of them.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 193, and willing without being strong yet. He takes contact to get to a shooting position and he is not yet able to win a puck back from an NHL defenceman.

18 penalty minutes over 62 games. The frame will carry more weight and that is the ordinary next step.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick who dominated the American League at 20 and translated it at 21 without a visible adjustment period.

The projection is a 25-goal winger, and the encouraging part is that the underlying numbers came with the goals rather than despite them. On a club whose problem is that its best players do not tilt the ice, he is one of two young forwards who did.

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
5 of his 15 goals late or in overtime, 100th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure barely repeats (0.06) · 10% keep it
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“The playmaking is the missing half — 9 assists in 62 games — and the puck skills under pressure are still developing.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“he is not yet able to win a puck back from an NHL defenceman”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“6-1 and 193, and willing without being strong yet.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 741 minutes

Expected goals: 49.8%; 51st pct
Shot attempts: 52%; 73rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 39 for, 37 against. Expected: 32.1 and 32.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

55th

Numbers

51st

The two rank him within 4 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 73 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 · 62 games

Top speed: 22.3 mph; 50th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.27 a game
Distance: 2.47 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.2 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 · 741 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 49.8% — 1.9 above the club he did it on.
The role: 741 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Bowen Byram	52.0%	48.0%	47.8%
Tage Thompson	52.1%	48.0%	50.4%
Rasmus Dahlin	54.8%	46.9%	53.3%

52.0% together, 48.0% for him apart and 47.8% 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

196 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 15 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 33% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.