Photo by Jenn G from Seattle, WA, CC BY-SA 2.0

Nick Schmaltz

33 goals, 11 of them on the power play, and the 88th percentile.

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

2016-17	CHI	61	6	22	28	+10	6	0	0	0	66	9.1	13:16
2017-18	CHI	78	21	31	52	+1	18	4	0	2	118	17.8	18:14
2018-19	CHI/ARI	40	7	18	25	-12	8	5	0	2	62	11.3	17:49
2019-20	ARI	70	11	34	45	+3	20	2	0	2	95	11.6	15:32
2020-21	ARI	52	10	22	32	-1	16	3	0	1	105	9.5	17:03
2021-22	ARI	63	23	36	59	+1	14	4	0	4	123	18.7	18:15
2022-23	ARI	63	22	36	58	+4	20	6	0	2	132	16.7	19:43
2023-24	ARI	79	22	39	61	-16	10	10	1	3	158	13.9	19:11
2024-25	UTA	82	20	43	63	-15	14	9	0	3	186	10.8	18:35
2025-26	UTA	82	33	41	74	+17	28	11	2	9	206	16.0	19:43
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	670	175	322	497	-8	154	54	3	28	1251	14.0	17:52

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

33 goals and 41 assists in all 82 games — 74 points, plus-17, at 19:43 a night with 11 power-play goals and 28 penalty minutes.

His 670th career game and his 497th point.

The Finesse Game

A career playmaker who has turned into a scorer. 289 unblocked attempts, 33 goals, median 22 feet with 44 per cent from inside 20 — good ice, and a career-high total by 10.

11 power-play goals is the largest part of the jump and it comes from a man who spent a decade being the passer on that unit.

41 assists says the old game is intact. 322 career assists.

The Physical Game

6 foot even and 184 pounds, and light. 28 penalty minutes.

He does not forecheck with weight and does not win pucks. The skating and the hands in tight are the whole proposition, and both are genuinely good.

The Intangibles

55.5 per cent of the expected goals, 90th percentile, and 55.9 per cent of the shot attempts, 92nd, across 1,189 minutes, with the chances 55.3 to 44.3 in his favour.

The goals came out 67-50 his way, 6 better than the chances, which on a club whose goaltending finished 6 goals worse than its chances is his line rather than his goaltender.

11 points in his last 10, 7 of them goals. He is 30, a 20th overall pick, and has played the best hockey of his career on the club’s best line beside Keller.

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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,189 minutes

Expected goals: 55.5%; 90th pct
Shot attempts: 55.9%; 93rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 67 for, 50 against. Expected: 55.3 and 44.3.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

78th

Numbers

90th

The two rank him within 12 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 — 77 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 23.2 mph; 91st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.54 a game
Distance: 3.22 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.3 mph; 79th 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 7 goals, 4 assists, 33 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1189 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: UTA took 53.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.5% — 2.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,189 minutes at five-on-five — 81st percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Clayton Keller	57.4%	36.9%	52.3%
Mikhail Sergachev	52.6%	57.4%	50.5%
John Marino	56.9%	54.7%	53.8%

57.4% together, 36.9% for him apart and 52.3% for Keller 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

289 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 33 of them goals. His median goal came from 15 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.