Armchair Hockey Scout

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2026-27 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2026-27 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

42

Noah Laba

New York Rangers Center

24 points as a rookie, and the 9th percentile behind them.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2025-26NYR7491524+2313017312.313:28
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—7491524+2313017312.313:28

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

9 goals and 15 assists in 74 games — 24 points, plus-2, at 13:28 a night with 31 penalty minutes. His first NHL season, at 22.

The Finesse Game

The location is sound: 114 unblocked attempts with 46 per cent from inside 20 feet, median 22, and 9 goals.

He goes to the net and is not afraid of the traffic, which for a fourth-round pick playing 13 minutes as a rookie is the reason he stuck.

15 assists is ordinary.

The Physical Game

6-3, 214, and he competes hard. 31 penalty minutes. He wins faceoffs and forechecks properly, and the size is real rather than decorative.

The Intangibles

45.6 per cent of the expected goals, 19th percentile, and 46.0 per cent of the shot attempts, 15th, across 879 minutes.

Those are poor and the club around him was poor at generating offence — 29th in the league — but the plus-2 beside them is doing a lot of work that the chances do not support.

5 points in his last 10. He is 23, a 111th overall pick, and a fourth-line centre who has already exceeded what that pick usually returns. The ceiling looks like a third line.

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 879 minutes

Expected goals
45.6%
19th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
46%
19th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 29 for, 26 against. Expected: 28.5 and 34.0.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
33rd
Numbers
19th

The two rank him within 14 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 — 69 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 · 74 games

Top speed
23.0 mph
86th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
2.42 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.20 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
79.6 mph
19th pct

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

5

points in his last 10 games — 2 goals, 3 assists, 16 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 879 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
NYR took 48.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 45.6% — 2.4 below the club he did it on.
The role
Third line, 879 minutes at five-on-five — 45th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Matthew Robertson48.0%44.5%48.9%
Braden Schneider46.2%45.2%43.4%
Conor Sheary48.1%44.5%49.6%

48.0% together, 44.5% for him apart and 48.9% for Robertson apart. He was worse away from Robertson, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Robertson did.

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

114 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 46% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.