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

Nico Sturm

An undrafted German centre who has made a career out of faceoffs, penalty killing and being where he is supposed to be.

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

2018-19	MIN	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	7	0.0	12:47
2019-20	MIN	6	0	2	2	+2	0	0	0	0	2	0.0	11:54
2020-21	MIN	50	11	6	17	+10	17	0	0	2	64	17.2	10:51
2021-22	MIN/COL	74	9	11	20	-7	14	1	1	0	101	8.9	11:54
2022-23	SJS	74	14	12	26	-13	23	0	1	1	119	11.8	14:44
2023-24	SJS	63	5	8	13	-25	12	0	1	0	69	7.2	14:40
2024-25	SJS/FLA	62	7	7	14	-6	20	0	1	1	59	11.9	10:25
2025-26	MIN	49	5	6	11	0	16	0	1	0	37	13.5	10:57
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	380	51	52	103	-39	102	1	5	4	458	11.1	12:25

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

5 goals and 11 points in 49 games on 11 minutes a night, even on the plus-minus. That is exactly the line he has produced for most of a decade.

The Finesse Game

Minimal by design. 51 goals in 380 career games. He does not carry the puck, does not create, and shoots rarely. What he does is win a faceoff and put the puck where it should go.

The faceoff work is the marketable skill. Coaches use him for defensive-zone draws late in games, which is a specific job that keeps players employed long after their offence has stopped mattering.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 209, and he uses the size on the penalty kill and along the wall. He blocks shots, he is hard to move off a puck, and he does not run around looking for hits.

The Intangibles

Undrafted out of Clarkson, a Stanley Cup on his record, and 4 organisations that have wanted the same 3 things from him. That is a real career and an unglamorous one.

At 31 he is what he is. The role survives a decline in foot speed better than most, and he is not relying on any skill that is about to disappear.

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.

hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
33% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 9th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 458 minutes

Expected goals: 47%; 29th pct
Shot attempts: 43.8%; 7th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 11 for, 15 against. Expected: 15.9 and 18.0.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

61st

Numbers

29th

The report ranks him 32 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 — 74 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 · 49 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 56th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.90 a game
Distance: 1.68 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.9 mph; 43rd 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 — 2 goals, 1 assists, 11 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 447 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: MIN took 50.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.0% — 3.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 458 minutes at five-on-five — 15th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Yakov Trenin	47.1%	46.9%	49.3%
Marcus Foligno	47.1%	47.0%	51.9%
Brock Faber	40.7%	50.6%	53.3%

47.1% together, 46.9% for him apart and 49.3% for Trenin apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

61 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 39% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.