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

JJ Peterka

27 goals and 68 points in Buffalo, and the largest thing this club bought in the summer.

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

2021-22	BUF	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	3	0.0	16:08
2022-23	BUF	77	12	20	32	-15	26	2	0	1	125	9.6	13:39
2023-24	BUF	82	28	22	50	+10	28	3	0	5	226	12.4	16:24
2024-25	BUF	77	27	41	68	-1	34	6	0	3	173	15.6	18:11
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	238	67	83	150	-6	88	11	0	9	527	12.7	16:05

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

27 goals and 41 assists in 77 games for Buffalo — 68 points, at 18:11 a night, minus-1, with 6 power-play goals and 3 game-winners on 173 shots, converting at 15.6 per cent.

It is a career high by ready thirty points and it came on a club that finished 26 points out of the playoffs. Utah acquired him in the summer for Michael Kesselring and a young forward, which is a considerable price and a defensible one.

The Finesse Game

173 attempts and 27 goals. The skating is the separator — he beats a defenceman wide from a standing start and he does it several times a night, and almost everything he produces comes from entering the zone with speed.

41 assists in 77 games. The passing has developed faster than anybody expected; he holds the puck an extra beat now rather than putting it at the net, and on a club that creates chances at the 3rd-best rate in the league that is the right instinct.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 189 and light. He does not forecheck with force and he does not win pucks against defencemen on the wall.

34 penalty minutes in 77 games is a moderate rate. He competes and he is not a physical presence, and the defensive detail is the standing criticism.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick in 2020 out of Munich, and 238 games and 150 points — one of the most productive German forwards in the league.

He is 23. Utah traded a top-four right-shot defenceman for him, which says the club believes it is a season away rather than three.

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
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.

transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“**The skating is the separator** — he beats a defenceman wide from a standing start and he does it several times a night, and almost everything he produces comes from entering the zone with speed.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“The passing has developed faster than anybody expected; he holds the puck an extra beat now rather than putting it at the net, and on a club that creates chances at the 3rd-best rate in the league that is the right instinct.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck with force and he does not win pucks against defencemen on the wall.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck with force and he does not win pucks against defencemen on the wall.”
defensively-responsiblehe lacks it· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“He competes and he is not a physical presence, and the defensive detail is the standing criticism.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,030 minutes

Expected goals: 47.3%; 29th pct
Shot attempts: 49.1%; 44th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 69 for, 57 against. Expected: 43.9 and 49.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

76th

Numbers

29th

The report ranks him 47 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 — 77 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 · 77 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 56th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.03 a game
Distance: 2.82 miles a game
Hardest shot: 86.2 mph; 52nd 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 BUF · 1030 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 47.3% — 0.6 below the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,030 minutes at five-on-five — 65th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Tage Thompson	49.7%	45.2%	52.1%
Rasmus Dahlin	54.8%	42.4%	53.0%
Bowen Byram	47.2%	47.3%	49.5%

49.7% together, 45.2% for him apart and 52.1% for Thompson apart. He was worse away from Thompson, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Thompson did.

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

276 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 28 of them goals. His median goal came from 24 feet. 25% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.