Photo by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Josh Doan

The best on-ice rate on the roster, and he gets it by shooting from 17 feet.

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

2023-24	ARI	11	5	4	9	+6	0	0	0	1	23	21.7	12:19
2024-25	UTA	51	7	12	19	-2	8	3	0	1	88	8.0	13:31
2025-26	BUF	82	25	27	52	-4	25	9	0	4	170	14.7	15:52
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	144	37	43	80	0	33	12	0	6	281	13.2	14:46

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 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

25 goals and 27 assists in all 82 games — 52 points, minus-4, at 15:52 a night, with 9 power-play goals.

The Finesse Game

He shoots from the right places and he shoots often. 252 unblocked attempts with 56 per cent of them inside 20 feet and a median of 17 — that is a net-front and slot player, and 25 goals is the reward for standing there.

The hands are good in tight rather than dazzling in open ice. He is not going to beat a defenceman one-on-one; he is going to arrive at the moment the puck does.

The Physical Game

6-2, 198, and he goes to the hard ice willingly. 25 penalty minutes is a player who takes the punishment that comes with the job rather than dishing it out.

The Intangibles

The best underlying season of any Sabre: 54.6 per cent of the expected goals — 88th percentile — with the goals 54-48 in his favour and the expected goals 50.6 to 42.0. Unlike most of the club’s plus numbers, the process is there underneath.

The minus-4 beside it is the sort of thing that gets a player misjudged. At 5-on-5 he was the most effective forward on the team by a clear margin.

He is 24, a second-round pick, and the son of a man who played 1,540 games in the desert. The comparison will follow him around; on this evidence he is a better player than the label suggests.

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

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
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
54.6% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 49.7% for his club in the minutes he sat: +4.9, 90th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,056 minutes

Expected goals: 54.6%; 86th pct
Shot attempts: 52%; 74th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 54 for, 48 against. Expected: 50.6 and 42.0.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

78th

Numbers

86th

The two rank him within 8 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

Both bars are percentiles among the 656 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, 2025-26 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 49th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.89 a game
Distance: 2.58 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.1 mph; 77th 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 2 goals, 3 assists, 14 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1056 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, 2025-26

The club: BUF took 51.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.6% — 3.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 1,056 minutes at five-on-five — 67th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Rasmus Dahlin	58.7%	52.0%	52.6%
Bowen Byram	48.6%	58.0%	49.6%
Tage Thompson	51.6%	56.6%	49.9%

58.7% together, 52.0% for him apart and 52.6% for Dahlin 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

252 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 25 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 56% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.