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.

Mason Appleton

Photo by Jenn G, CC BY-SA 2.0

Mason Appleton

Detroit Red Wings Center #22

465 games, and the 5th percentile.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2018-19WPG363710+940012910.38:12
2019-20WPG46538-920010559.111:10
2020-21WPG56121325+11140018813.614:25
2021-22SEA/WPG6881321-130003988.214:53
2022-23WPG4151116+28100717.016:01
2023-24WPG82142236+162621212211.516:03
2024-25WPG71101222+7220031079.314:50
2025-26DET656814-444002639.513:31
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—4656389152+31168321263310.014:03

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

6 goals and 8 assists in 65 games — 14 points, minus-4, at 13:31 a night with 44 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

Thin and pointed the wrong way. 89 unblocked attempts from a median of 31 feet with only 30 per cent inside 20, and 6 goals. 152 points in 465 career games.

He is a fourth-line winger who forechecks and does not create.

The Physical Game

6-2, 196, and he plays a willing checking game. 44 penalty minutes in 65 games from 13 minutes a night is a fair rate.

The Intangibles

42 and a half per cent of the expected goals — 5th percentile — with the expected goals 23.7 to 33.4 against across 779 minutes. That is the worst mark on the roster and one of the worst of any regular in this edition.

The Corsi is much less bad at 47.1 per cent, 27th percentile, which says his line had the puck a reasonable amount and did nothing dangerous with it while conceding plenty.

3 points in his last 10. He is 30, a sixth-round pick, and a useful fourth-liner on a better team. On a club already short of quality he is one of the reasons the bottom 6 was outchanced all year.

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.

  • perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in

    31.5% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 95th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 779 minutes

Expected goals
41.6%
4th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
46.8%
25th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 22 for, 28 against. Expected: 23.7 and 33.4.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
8th
Numbers
4th

The two rank him within 4 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 — 63 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 · 65 games

Top speed
22.1 mph
41st pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
1.43 a game

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

Distance
2.15 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
81.4 mph
28th 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 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

3

points in his last 10 games — 1 goals, 2 assists, 15 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 779 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
DET took 48.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 41.6% — 6.6 below the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 779 minutes at five-on-five — 36th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Ben Chiarot38.1%44.4%44.3%
Michael Rasmussen39.1%43.0%48.6%
Moritz Seider53.9%36.4%56.0%

38.1% together, 44.4% for him apart and 44.3% for Chiarot 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

89 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 24 feet. 30% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 31% from beyond forty.