Oliver Wahlstrom

Eleventh overall in 2018, and 67 points in 193 games across five seasons.

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

2019-20	NYI	9	0	0	0	-2	4	0	0	0	9	0.0	10:17
2020-21	NYI	44	12	9	21	+2	21	4	0	1	94	12.8	12:23
2021-22	NYI	73	13	11	24	-6	74	5	0	2	157	8.3	12:04
2022-23	NYI	35	7	9	16	+5	32	1	0	1	70	10.0	12:10
2023-24	NYI	32	2	4	6	-6	8	1	0	0	41	4.9	11:04
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	193	34	33	67	-7	139	11	0	4	371	9.2	11:54

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

32 games, 2 goals and 4 assists for 6 points, 1 on the power play, 8 penalty minutes, 11:04 a night and minus-6. He took 42.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 333 minutes, and his ice went 10-16 against an expectation of 12.30-16.39.

Two goals of scoring that did not arrive and level at the other end. Six points in thirty-two games at eleven minutes a night is a fourth-line season from an eleventh-overall pick in his fifth year.

The Finesse Game

58 attempts at a median of 31 feet with 29 per cent from inside 20, 41 on goal, converted at 4.9 per cent against a career 9.16.

33 career assists in 193 games. The shot was the reason he went eleventh and it is still the best thing about him — a heavy one-timer from the right circle. He shoots from further out than almost anybody else on this roster and gets to the interior rarely.

The Physical Game

He is 6-2 and 205 and does not use it.

139 career penalty minutes in 193 games is a real rate for a man who plays eleven minutes and most of it is frustration. He does not forecheck by force and does not win many walls.

The Intangibles

Eleventh overall in 2018 out of Portland, Maine, five seasons, and 67 points in 193 games, all of it for one organisation.

He is 24 and the club has given him five years. Thirty-four goals in 193 games is not what an eleventh-overall pick is for, and this is the last season in which the question is still open.

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.

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.

punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is 6-2 and 205 and does not use it.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck by force and does not win many walls.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck by force and does not win many walls.”
net-fronthe lacks it· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He shoots from further out than almost anybody else on this roster and gets to the interior rarely.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 333 minutes

Expected goals: 42.9%; 10th pct
Shot attempts: 40.9%; 2nd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 10 for, 16 against. Expected: 12.3 and 16.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

17th

Numbers

10th

The two rank him within 7 points of one another. 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.

Both bars are percentiles among the 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 61 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, 2023-24 · 32 games

Top speed: 21.2 mph; 15th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.28 a game
Distance: 1.78 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.0 mph; 81st 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.

Usual linemates

2023-24 · 333 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, 2023-24

The club: NYI took 49.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.9% — 6.2 below the club he did it on.
The role: 333 minutes at five-on-five — 8th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jean-Gabriel Pageau	41.3%	45.1%	45.5%
Anders Lee	48.3%	39.1%	54.2%
Noah Dobson	44.0%	42.1%	50.2%

41.3% together, 45.1% for him apart and 45.5% for Pageau 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

58 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 29% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 24% from beyond forty.