Photo by CloutsnChara Sports Cards, CC BY 3.0

Noah Dobson

A big right-shot defenceman who plays 22 minutes and has never quite been the player his best season promised.

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

2019-20	NYI	34	1	6	7	-1	8	0	0	0	37	2.7	13:17
2020-21	NYI	46	3	11	14	+1	8	0	0	0	69	4.3	16:24
2021-22	NYI	80	13	38	51	-3	18	3	0	4	190	6.8	21:28
2022-23	NYI	78	13	36	49	+4	20	5	0	2	206	6.3	20:23
2023-24	NYI	79	10	60	70	+12	36	1	0	4	174	5.8	24:31
2024-25	NYI	71	10	29	39	-16	28	1	0	1	196	5.1	23:16
2025-26	MTL	80	12	35	47	+5	34	2	0	1	158	7.6	22:29
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	468	62	215	277	+2	152	12	0	12	1030	6.0	21:09

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

12 goals and 47 points in 80 games, plus-5, on 22 and a half minutes a night. He played 65 percent of his 5-on-5 time with Matheson, and the 2 of them took the hardest assignments.

The Finesse Game

The tools are considerable. He is a smooth skater for 6-4, he moves the puck cleanly under pressure, and he has a genuinely heavy point shot that he gets through traffic. He can quarterback a power play, though on this roster he does not have to.

The passing is his best attribute — long, accurate outlets that start a rush before the other team has changed. When he is playing well he looks like a number-1 defenceman.

The consistency is the recurring note. There are stretches where the puck decisions get loose and the offensive instincts pull him out of position, and those stretches have followed him from Long Island.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 200, which is tall rather than heavy. He defends with reach and stick rather than by punishing people, and a strong forward can establish position on him in front of the net.

The Intangibles

He put up 70 points once and has not been near it since, which has shaped how he is discussed — a little unfairly, since 47 points on a defensive pairing is a good season.

He is 26, signed long-term, and playing beside a young defenceman who takes all the attention. What he becomes over the next 3 years determines whether this defence is good or genuinely dangerous.

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
80 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 · 1,452 minutes

Expected goals: 47.4%; 32nd pct
Shot attempts: 47.4%; 30th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 70 for, 64 against. Expected: 61.7 and 68.5.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

86th

Numbers

32nd

The report ranks him 54 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 — 79 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 · 80 games

Top speed: 22.5 mph; 81st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.81 a game
Distance: 3.04 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.5 mph; 71st 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 — 0 goals, 2 assists, 22 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1452 minutes at five-on-five

Mike Matheson67%
Lane Hutson20%

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 47.4% — 2.4 below the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,452 minutes at five-on-five — 95th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Mike Matheson	45.4%	51.4%	49.3%
Nick Suzuki	50.2%	45.5%	57.3%
Juraj Slafkovský	47.0%	47.7%	53.9%

45.4% together, 51.4% for him apart and 49.3% for Matheson apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

244 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 12 of them goals. His median goal came from 41 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 73% from beyond forty.