This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Mats Zuccarello

Undrafted out of Oslo, 438 career assists, and 51 of them at 36.

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

2010-11	NYR	42	6	17	23	+3	4	0	0	2	74	8.1	14:10
2011-12	NYR	10	2	1	3	0	6	1	0	1	10	20.0	10:03
2012-13	NYR	15	3	5	8	+10	8	0	0	0	27	11.1	16:25
2013-14	NYR	77	19	40	59	+11	32	4	1	4	170	11.2	17:08
2014-15	NYR	78	15	34	49	+17	45	0	0	3	154	9.7	17:16
2015-16	NYR	81	26	35	61	+2	34	7	0	4	166	15.7	18:29
2016-17	NYR	80	15	44	59	+15	26	5	0	3	189	7.9	18:50
2017-18	NYR	80	16	37	53	-10	36	1	0	3	178	9.0	18:55
2018-19	NYR/DAL	48	12	28	40	-8	24	3	0	1	104	11.5	19:51
2019-20	MIN	65	15	22	37	-9	18	3	0	2	96	15.6	15:56
2020-21	MIN	42	11	24	35	+9	8	3	0	0	74	14.9	16:41
2021-22	MIN	70	24	55	79	+21	24	7	0	2	159	15.1	18:35
2022-23	MIN	78	22	45	67	-3	26	9	0	3	198	11.1	20:12
2023-24	MIN	69	12	51	63	-5	30	5	0	1	173	6.9	18:54
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	835	198	438	636	+53	321	48	1	29	1772	11.2	17:57

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

69 games, 12 goals and 51 assists for 63 points, 5 on the power play, 30 penalty minutes, 18:54 a night and minus-5. He took 52.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 974 minutes, the 70th percentile, and his ice went 45-39 against an expectation of 38.75-35.21.

Six goals of finishing above expectation and four more conceded than the chances called for. Fifty-one assists at 36 on a club that finished twenty-first in scoring.

The Finesse Game

246 attempts at a median of 33 feet with 37 per cent from beyond 40, converted at 6.9 per cent against a career 11.17.

438 career assists in 835 games. He does not shoot to score any more and the twelve goals say so. What he does is hold the puck on the wall until a lane opens, and the pass that follows is the reason this club has the best power play in the league.

The Physical Game

He is 5-8 and 181 and avoids contact wherever the puck allows it.

30 penalty minutes in 69 games is a low rate. He does not forecheck, does not win the wall by force, and is easy to move off a puck by anybody who can catch him.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Oslo, fourteen seasons across three organisations, and 636 points in 835 games.

He is 37 and produced 63 points. The feet went two years ago and the head has not, and a club with four forwards worth watching cannot replace the fourth of them.

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
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.

perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
37.0% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 99th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“What he does is hold the puck on the wall until a lane opens, and the pass that follows is the reason this club has the best power play in the league.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck, does not win the wall by force, and is easy to move off a puck by anybody who can catch him.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck, does not win the wall by force, and is easy to move off a puck by anybody who can catch him.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He does not forecheck, does not win the wall by force, and is easy to move off a puck by anybody who can catch him.”
undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, out of Oslo, fourteen seasons across three organisations, and 636 points in 835 games.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 974 minutes

Expected goals: 52.4%; 71st pct
Shot attempts: 49.9%; 54th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 45 for, 39 against. Expected: 38.8 and 35.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

43rd

Numbers

71st

The numbers rank him 28 points above where the report does. 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 68 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, 2023-24 · 69 games

Top speed: 23.1 mph; 91st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.52 a game
Distance: 2.65 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.9 mph; 71st 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

2023-24 · 974 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, 2023-24

The club: MIN took 51.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.4% — 1.1 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 974 minutes at five-on-five — 55th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Marco Rossi	52.0%	52.9%	53.8%
Kirill Kaprizov	52.5%	52.3%	57.7%
Brock Faber	47.3%	55.5%	51.5%

52.0% together, 52.9% for him apart and 53.8% for Rossi apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

246 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 15 of them goals. His median goal came from 20 feet. 24% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 37% from beyond forty.