Armchair Hockey Scout

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2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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91

Kent Johnson

Columbus Blue Jackets Center

24 goals on a 19.5 per cent rate at 22, from a winger who weighs 170 pounds.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22CBJ9033+2200050.012:27
2022-23CBJ79162440-191450312612.714:31
2023-24CBJ4261016-210001629.713:33
2024-25CBJ68243357+21641412319.517:18
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—1984670116-174291831614.615:10

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

24 goals and 33 assists in 68 games for 57 points, plus-2, on 17:18 a night.

19.5 per cent shooting on 123 shots, which is roughly double a sustainable rate for a winger taking only a quarter of his attempts from inside 20 feet. 48.5 per cent chance share, the 30th percentile, with on-ice goals of 51-40 against an expected 34-36.

The Finesse Game

The most creative player on the roster. The hands are exceptional in small areas, he sees passes nobody else on this club looks for, and 33 assists understates it because his linemates could not always finish.

The shot is decent and 24 goals from it is a fiction of one season. What he does is beat a man one-on-one and make a play — and the distances say he does it from the perimeter, which is where a 170-pound winger is allowed to work.

The Physical Game

6 feet and 170, and among the lightest forwards in the league. He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with any force, and is removed from possession by NHL defencemen as a matter of routine.

16 penalty minutes over 68 games. He is not in the traffic. The frame is the whole question of his career and it is not obvious that it changes.

The Intangibles

A 5th overall pick who took four seasons to establish himself and finally did it in a year the club needed him.

At 22 the skill is not in doubt. The two things that are: a shooting rate that will halve, and a body that has to survive playing inside if he is ever to be more than a power-play specialist.

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.

  • playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “he sees passes nobody else on this club looks for, and 33 assists understates it because his linemates could not always finish”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with any force, and is removed from possession by NHL defencemen as a matter of routine.”

  • forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck

    “He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with any force, and is removed from possession by NHL defencemen as a matter of routine.”

  • hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand

    “He does not win pucks, does not forecheck with any force, and is removed from possession by NHL defencemen as a matter of routine.”

  • net-fronthe lacks it· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips

    “He is not in the traffic.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 877 minutes

Expected goals
48.5%
38th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
50.5%
58th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 51 for, 40 against. Expected: 34.3 and 36.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
42nd
Numbers
38th

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 — 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, 2024-25 · 68 games

Top speed
22.2 mph
46th pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
1.10 a game

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

Distance
2.74 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
83.3 mph
35th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.9

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 · 877 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
CBJ took 48.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.5% — 0.2 above the club he did it on.
The role
Third line, 877 minutes at five-on-five — 42nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Zach Werenski54.0%43.6%53.3%
James van Riemsdyk46.1%50.1%48.6%
Ivan Provorov46.4%49.5%46.8%

54.0% together, 43.6% for him apart and 53.3% for Werenski apart. He was worse away from Werenski, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Werenski 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

180 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.