Armchair Hockey Scout

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2026-27 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2026-27 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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Josh Samanski

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

Josh Samanski

Edmonton Oilers Center #81

An undrafted German center who went from the DEL to a two-way NHL role in a single year.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2025-26EDM24224+26000922.210:34
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—24224+26000922.210:34

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

2 goals and 4 points in 24 games as a rookie, plus-2, on 10 and a half minutes a night, with 9 shots on goal all season. Those are fourth-line numbers in a fourth-line role, and they are also the first NHL games of his career.

The Finesse Game

There is very little NHL evidence to go on. 9 shots in 24 games says a player who is not looking to shoot and is being asked to play a simple, containing game — chip it in, get on the forecheck, change.

He is 6-2 and skates well enough to hold a fourth-line job, and the coaching staff trusted him enough to keep dressing him, which for an undrafted rookie is its own kind of endorsement.

The Physical Game

200 pounds and willing. He is not a punishing forechecker but he finishes checks and gets to the areas he is asked to get to.

The Intangibles

Undrafted players who reach the NHL at 24 have almost always done it on habits rather than talent, and the safe assumption is that this is what he is: a coachable, positionally sound depth center who does what he is told.

Whether there is anything more than that is genuinely unknown. The sample is 24 games.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 243 minutes

Expected goals
49.1%
47th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
49.9%
57th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 11 for, 9 against. Expected: 7.8 and 8.1.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
44th
Numbers
47th

The two rank him within 3 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 — 71 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 · 24 games

Top speed
21.7 mph
28th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
1.13 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
1.73 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
74.7 mph
9th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.6

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 10 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

4

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

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 243 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
EDM took 51.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.1% — 2.5 below the club he did it on.
The role
243 minutes at five-on-five — 2nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Darnell Nurse41.5%56.2%49.7%
Jake Walman45.4%51.4%45.4%
Trent Frederic47.0%50.1%47.9%

41.5% together, 56.2% for him apart and 49.7% for Nurse 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

19 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 43 feet. 37% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.