Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

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.

Paul Cotter

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

Paul Cotter

Vancouver Canucks Left Wing #47

296 games, and 24 goals for against 45.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22VGK7202+160001118.28:49
2022-23VGK5513518-5150017617.112:50
2023-24VGK7671825-11412001007.012:44
2024-25NJD7916622-14620029017.813:05
2025-26NJD799615-24190026114.810:41
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—296473582-5314320533813.912:12

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 6 assists in 79 games — 15 points, minus-24, at 10:41 a night with 19 penalty minutes. His 5-on-5 work was done in New Jersey.

82 points in 296 career games.

The Finesse Game

106 unblocked attempts produced 11 goals — a good conversion — from a median of 20 feet with 51 per cent from inside 20.

That is a fourth-line winger shooting from the right place. 6 assists in 79 games is among the lowest returns in this edition.

The Physical Game

6-2, 213, and he plays a genuinely heavy forechecking game — he finishes checks, wins the wall, and fights. 19 penalty minutes is surprisingly low for the way he plays.

The skating is honest and the size is the tool.

The Intangibles

42.0 per cent of the expected goals, 5th percentile, and 43.7 per cent of the shot attempts, seventh, across 827 minutes in New Jersey, with the goals 15 for and 41 against.

New Jersey scored 136 goals at 5-on-5 against an expected 173.9 — the worst finishing gap in the league — and a fourth-line winger playing 10 minutes a night on that club wears a great deal of it.

He is 26, a fourth-round pick, and joins the 1 team in the league that finished worse in chance share than the one he left.

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

    79 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 · 827 minutes

Expected goals
42%
5th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
43.7%
6th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 15 for, 41 against. Expected: 25.9 and 35.8.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
44th
Numbers
5th

The report ranks him 39 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 — 71 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 · 79 games

Top speed
23.1 mph
88th pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
2.08 a game

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

Distance
1.77 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
91.7 mph
89th 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 — 4 goals, 1 assists, 14 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 with NJD · 827 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
NJD took 50.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.0% — 8.4 below the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 827 minutes at five-on-five — 40th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Simon Nemec38.7%43.9%51.5%
Jonas Siegenthaler42.9%41.5%50.7%
Brenden Dillon45.8%40.4%51.3%

38.7% together, 43.9% for him apart and 51.5% for Nemec 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

106 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 8 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.