Photo by Princesse sabrina, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Nick Suzuki
Montréal Canadiens Center #14
100-point captain who does not have a single spectacular tool, and is the best player on his team by a distance.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | MTL | 71 | 13 | 28 | 41 | -15 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 138 | 9.4 | 15:59 |
| 2020-21 | MTL | 56 | 15 | 26 | 41 | -5 | 26 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 110 | 13.6 | 18:11 |
| 2021-22 | MTL | 82 | 21 | 40 | 61 | -29 | 30 | 8 | 1 | 4 | 186 | 11.3 | 20:31 |
| 2022-23 | MTL | 82 | 26 | 40 | 66 | -13 | 33 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 162 | 16.1 | 21:06 |
| 2023-24 | MTL | 82 | 33 | 44 | 77 | -14 | 36 | 12 | 0 | 1 | 185 | 17.8 | 21:16 |
| 2024-25 | MTL | 82 | 30 | 59 | 89 | +19 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 9 | 172 | 17.4 | 20:04 |
| 2025-26 | MTL | 82 | 29 | 72 | 101 | +37 | 28 | 11 | 1 | 2 | 183 | 15.8 | 20:49 |
| 2026-27 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 537 | 167 | 309 | 476 | -20 | 167 | 53 | 8 | 20 | 1136 | 14.7 | 19:51 |
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
29 goals and 72 assists in all 82 games for 101 points, plus-37 — the best mark on the club — on nearly 21 minutes a night. He played 83 percent of his 5-on-5 ice time with Caufield, which is close to the tightest forward partnership in the league.
The Finesse Game
Nothing about him looks fast or violent. What he has instead is timing. He arrives at the top of the circles a half-second before the puck does, he holds it until a defender commits, and the pass goes to where his winger will be rather than where he is. 72 assists is not an accident of linemates; the same winger scored 51 goals.
He is a better shooter than his reputation allows, particularly from the off wing on the power play, and he has become genuinely dangerous in tight after years of being purely a distributor.
The skating is average and always has been. He compensates by never being in a race — he reads the play early enough that he does not have to win one.
The Physical Game
5-11 and 207, thickly built, and much harder to knock off a puck than the height suggests. He is not a forechecker who finishes checks, and he does not need to be; he takes pucks with his stick and his positioning.
He has not missed games. 4 straight full seasons is its own kind of value.
The Intangibles
He was the return in a trade that defined a rebuild, took the captaincy at 22 of a team that was the worst in the league, and has grown into it without a false step. The plus-37 on a young roster says as much about how he plays away from the puck as the 101 points say about the rest.
There is no obvious criticism left. The question about him now is only whether a first line centred by a player without elite speed holds up in a playoff series, and that will get answered soon.
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
- drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
53.9% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 47.8% for his club in the minutes he sat: +6.1, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
- workhorse· carries the load at even strength
14:58 a game at five-on-five, 93rd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,227 minutes
- Expected goals
- 53.9%
- 82nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.6%
- 79th 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: 72 for, 39 against. Expected: 60.3 and 51.6.
The eye and the numbers
SightedThe two rank him within 16 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 — 84 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
- 23.6 mph
- 96th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.89 a game
- Distance
- 3.31 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 86.0 mph
- 56th 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 83.6
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
13
points in his last 10 games — 5 goals, 8 assists, 25 shots
Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.
Usual linemates
2025-26 · 1227 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
- MTL took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.9% — 4.1 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First line, 1,227 minutes at five-on-five — 84th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cole Caufield | 55.3% | 44.9% | — |
| Juraj Slafkovský | 54.3% | 53.3% | 46.2% |
| Mike Matheson | 49.4% | 58.1% | 44.9% |
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
309 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 28 of them goals. His median goal came from 27 feet. 33% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.