This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Nils Lundkvist
Dallas Stars Defense
39 games, no goals, and a right-shot defenceman who has now had two organisations decide he is not quite an NHL regular.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | NYR | 25 | 1 | 3 | 4 | +4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 32 | 3.1 | 13:56 |
| 2022-23 | DAL | 60 | 6 | 10 | 16 | -5 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 94 | 6.4 | 16:19 |
| 2023-24 | DAL | 59 | 2 | 17 | 19 | +13 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 73 | 2.7 | 14:06 |
| 2024-25 | DAL | 39 | 0 | 5 | 5 | +4 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 52 | 0.0 | 15:01 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 183 | 9 | 35 | 44 | +16 | 62 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 251 | 3.6 | 14:60 |
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
0 goals and 5 assists in 39 games, plus-4, on 15:01 a night.
52.1 per cent at five-on-five, the 70th percentile, over 570 minutes in sheltered third-pair usage. 52 shots and no goals, with 80 per cent of his attempts from beyond 40 feet.
The Finesse Game
The skating is genuinely good and it is the reason he keeps getting chances. He retrieves under pressure, escapes a first forechecker, and moves the puck quickly enough that a breakout does not stall.
What has never arrived is the offence he was drafted for. 5 points in 39 games, no goals, and a shot that killers and defencemen do not respect. He was a scoring defenceman in Sweden and has not been one here in four seasons.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 194, and light for the position. He does not defend the net front, does not win a battle against a heavy forward, and is the second man on most pucks in his own corner.
20 penalty minutes in 39 games is a high rate and it is the tell: he is beaten and reaching more than a defenceman of this usage should be.
The Intangibles
A first-round pick who forced his way out of one organisation and has not established himself in the next, which at 25 is starting to look like the answer rather than a delay.
The projection is a seventh defenceman who can play twenty games and not hurt anybody. There is a real player in the skating; there is no evidence yet that the rest of it arrives.
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
- 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.
“He retrieves under pressure, escapes a first forechecker, and moves the puck quickly enough that a breakout does not stall.”
“He does not defend the net front”
“does not win a battle against a heavy forward, and is the second man on most pucks in his own corner”
“20 penalty minutes in 39 games is a high rate and it is the tell: he is beaten and reaching more than a defenceman of this usage should be.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 570 minutes
- Expected goals
- 52.1%
- 70th pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.5%
- 78th 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: 20 for, 16 against. Expected: 26.5 and 24.3.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 59 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 — 64 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 · 39 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 64th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.74 a game
- Distance
- 2.25 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 98.3 mph
- 92nd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 89.7
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 · 570 minutes at five-on-five
- Esa Lindell58%
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
- DAL took 50.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.1% — 1.4 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 570 minutes at five-on-five — 21st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Esa Lindell | 49.3% | 55.8% | 51.0% |
| Jason Robertson | 51.9% | 52.2% | 54.0% |
| Matt Duchene | 45.9% | 55.5% | 52.2% |
49.3% together, 55.8% for him apart and 51.0% for Lindell apart. He was better away from Lindell, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Lindell.
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
79 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 0 of them goals. 4% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 80% from beyond forty.