This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Nick Cousins
Ottawa Senators Center
Forty-one penalty minutes in 50 games from a fourth-line centre whose job description is to be disliked.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | PHI | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0.0 | 8:49 |
| 2015-16 | PHI | 36 | 6 | 5 | 11 | +5 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 41 | 14.6 | 10:44 |
| 2016-17 | PHI | 60 | 6 | 10 | 16 | -6 | 31 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 99 | 6.1 | 12:00 |
| 2017-18 | ARI | 71 | 12 | 7 | 19 | -7 | 31 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 119 | 10.1 | 12:52 |
| 2018-19 | ARI | 81 | 7 | 20 | 27 | -8 | 35 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 144 | 4.9 | 13:33 |
| 2019-20 | MTL/VGK | 65 | 10 | 15 | 25 | 0 | 35 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 115 | 8.7 | 13:31 |
| 2020-21 | NSH | 52 | 5 | 13 | 18 | +4 | 41 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 60 | 8.3 | 13:22 |
| 2021-22 | NSH | 68 | 9 | 13 | 22 | -8 | 31 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 103 | 8.7 | 12:28 |
| 2022-23 | FLA | 79 | 9 | 18 | 27 | -1 | 38 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 102 | 8.8 | 11:02 |
| 2023-24 | FLA | 69 | 7 | 8 | 15 | +1 | 64 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 111 | 6.3 | 12:11 |
| 2024-25 | OTT | 50 | 6 | 9 | 15 | -1 | 41 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 68 | 8.8 | 11:54 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 642 | 77 | 118 | 195 | -20 | 353 | 9 | 0 | 11 | 968 | 8.0 | 12:22 |
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
6 goals and 9 assists in 50 games — 15 points at 11:54 a night, with 41 penalty minutes.
49.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 53rd percentile, across 569 minutes. His ice went 23-25 against an expectation of 20.06-20.59, which is a fourth line that came out slightly ahead of a neutral expectation.
The Finesse Game
68 attempts at a median of 25 feet with 36 per cent from inside 20. 6 goals in 50 games is the honest offensive ceiling and it always has been.
The hands are ordinary. What he does have is a good sense of where a fourth line is supposed to be, and he does not lose a shift by being out of position.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 191, and among the most disliked players in the league by design. He hits, he talks, he goes into the scrum after the whistle, and he is very good at making an opponent take the penalty.
41 penalty minutes in 50 games is a rate that puts him among the least disciplined forwards here, and a share of it is the answer to something somebody did to him first.
The Intangibles
A third-round pick in 2011 who has played for six organisations in eleven seasons and won a Stanley Cup in Florida in 2023 doing exactly this job.
642 games and 195 points. He is 32, he came to Ottawa as a free agent in 2024, and the club signed him because a roster with this much youth in it needed somebody who had already won a series.
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
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.
“He hits, he talks, he goes into the scrum after the whistle, and he is very good at making an opponent take the penalty.”
“He hits, he talks, he goes into the scrum after the whistle, and he is very good at making an opponent take the penalty.”
“**41 penalty minutes in 50 games** is a rate that puts him among the least disciplined forwards here, and a share of it is the answer to something somebody did to him first.”
“What he does have is a good sense of where a fourth line is supposed to be, and he does not lose a shift by being out of position.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 569 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.4%
- 48th pct
- Shot attempts
- 51.5%
- 70th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 23 for, 25 against. Expected: 20.1 and 20.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 12 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 — 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, 2024-25 · 50 games
- Top speed
- 21.6 mph
- 21st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.80 a game
- Distance
- 2.06 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 75.2 mph
- 9th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
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 · 569 minutes at five-on-five
- Shane Pinto42%
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
- OTT took 50.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.4% — 0.8 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 569 minutes at five-on-five — 20th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shane Pinto | 55.0% | 45.1% | 52.0% |
| Thomas Chabot | 55.8% | 45.0% | 52.1% |
| Nick Jensen | 52.8% | 47.0% | 50.2% |
55.0% together, 45.1% for him apart and 52.0% for Pinto 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 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 36% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 27% from beyond forty.