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.

Max Sasson

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

Max Sasson

Vancouver Canucks Center #63

Undrafted, 13 goals from 91 shots, and 11 minutes a night.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2024-25VAN29347+10000319.710:20
2025-26VAN6613619-13260006221.011:43
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—95161026-12260009317.211:18

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

13 goals and 6 assists in 66 games — 19 points, minus-13, at 11:43 a night.

26 points in 95 career games.

The Finesse Game

91 unblocked attempts produced 13 goals — a 14 per cent conversion, the highest on the club — from a median of 25 feet with 40 per cent from inside 20.

That is a good rate off low volume and it is not one anybody sustains. 6 assists in 66 games is close to the lowest offensive return in this edition.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 181 pounds, and light. 26 penalty minutes.

He forechecks with real speed and does not win the exchanges he starts. The quickness is the whole tool and it is genuinely good.

The Intangibles

44.4 per cent of the expected goals, 12th percentile, against 49.2 per cent of the shot attempts, 51st, across 723 minutes.

That 4-point gap is the wrong direction — as many shots as the opposition, and considerably worse ones — which is a description of Vancouver rather than of him.

8 points in his last 10, 4 of them goals. He is 25, undrafted out of Western Michigan, and 13 goals in 11 minutes a night is a genuinely useful thing to have found for nothing.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 723 minutes

Expected goals
44.4%
12th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
49.2%
50th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 21 for, 37 against. Expected: 25.8 and 32.3.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
38th
Numbers
12th

The report ranks him 26 points above where the numbers do. It was written with these numbers on screen and departs from them anyway, which makes the gap a judgment rather than an oversight. 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 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 70 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 · 66 games

Top speed
23.7 mph
97th pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
2.88 a game

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

Distance
2.00 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
84.0 mph
44th 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

8

points in his last 10 games — 4 goals, 4 assists, 16 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 723 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
VAN took 43.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.4% — 0.9 above the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 723 minutes at five-on-five — 32nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Linus Karlsson52.6%36.1%46.7%
Filip Hronek43.9%44.8%45.3%
Marcus Pettersson47.7%42.7%41.5%

52.6% together, 36.1% for him apart and 46.7% for Karlsson 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

91 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 13 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 40% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 22% from beyond forty.