This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Nick Schmaltz

63 points and a minus-15, and the ice he was on scored 26 goals against an expectation of 50.

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 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	588	142	281	423	-25	126	43	1	19	1045	13.6	17:36

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

20 goals and 43 assists in 82 games — 63 points at 18:35 a night, minus-15, with 9 power-play goals on 186 shots and only 14 penalty minutes.

54.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 77th percentile. His ice went 49-46 against an expectation of 53.54-45.38. Five goals of scoring did not arrive, on a line that was creating at a rate almost nobody in the league matched.

The Finesse Game

186 attempts at a median of 25 feet with 37 per cent from inside 20, converting at 10.8 per cent.

43 assists says what he is. He is a carrier and a distributor who holds the puck through the neutral zone and finds the late man, and he has thrown forty or more assists in three of the last four seasons.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 184 and light. He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and he is not used against a first line.

14 penalty minutes in 82 games is among the lowest totals of any regular in this edition. He is entirely out of the physical half of the game.

The Intangibles

Twentieth overall in 2014 by Chicago, traded to Arizona at 22 for a package that has aged extremely well for the club that received him — 588 games and 423 points.

He is 29. He has missed substantial time in three seasons to injury and last year he played all 82 for the first time in his career.

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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“**43 assists says what he is.** He is a carrier and a distributor who holds the puck through the neutral zone and finds the late man, and he has thrown forty or more assists in three of the last four seasons.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and he is not used against a first line.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and he is not used against a first line.”
fouls-when-beatena strength· the stick foul that follows losing a step
“**14 penalty minutes in 82 games** is among the lowest totals of any regular in this edition.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,113 minutes

Expected goals: 54.1%; 86th pct
Shot attempts: 53%; 83rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 49 for, 46 against. Expected: 53.5 and 45.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

66th

Numbers

86th

The numbers rank him 20 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 75 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 45th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.63 a game
Distance: 3.06 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.5 mph; 35th 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

2024-25 · 1113 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, 2024-25

The club: UTA took 53.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.1% — 0.9 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,113 minutes at five-on-five — 76th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Clayton Keller	55.9%	48.1%	45.0%
Barrett Hayton	57.8%	50.5%	58.2%
Mikhail Sergachev	55.4%	53.2%	50.2%

55.9% together, 48.1% for him apart and 45.0% 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

265 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 21 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 38% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.