This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Pontus Holmberg

Nineteen points in 68 games in Toronto, and a fourth-line centre signed in the summer.

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

2022-23	TOR	37	5	8	13	0	18	1	0	2	27	18.5	10:25
2023-24	TOR	54	7	10	17	+11	18	0	0	1	54	13.0	11:34
2024-25	TOR	68	7	12	19	+4	27	0	1	0	68	10.3	12:40
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	159	19	30	49	+15	63	1	1	3	149	12.8	11:46

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

7 goals and 12 assists in 68 games for Toronto — 19 points at 12:40 a night, plus-4, with a shorthanded goal and 27 penalty minutes.

He played every game of Toronto’s playoff run and was a fourth-line centre on a club that finished with 108 points. That is the job description he was signed to repeat.

The Finesse Game

68 attempts and 7 goals at 10.3 per cent. There is no shot to speak of: 49 points in 159 NHL games.

12 assists in 68 games. He supports the puck low, he makes the simple play out of his own end, and he wins the draw that begins the shift.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 201 and honest. He forechecks properly, he blocks shots, and he does not initiate much.

27 penalty minutes in 68 games. He is disciplined, he can be trusted with a lead, and he kills penalties on a unit that finished 30th in the league in shorthanded time.

The Intangibles

A sixth-round pick in 2018 out of Sweden, and 159 NHL games in across three seasons.

He is 26 and Tampa Bay signed him in the summer. On a roster whose bottom six lost three men, a cheap fourth-line centre who kills penalties is exactly the sort of signing this organisation makes.

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

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.

faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“He supports the puck low, he makes the simple play out of his own end, and he wins the draw that begins the shift.”
shot-blockera strength· gets in front of it
“He forechecks properly, he blocks shots, and he does not initiate much.”
defensively-responsiblea strength· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“He is disciplined, he can be trusted with a lead, and he kills penalties on a unit that finished 30th in the league in shorthanded time.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He is disciplined, he can be trusted with a lead, and he kills penalties on a unit that finished 30th in the league in shorthanded time.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 748 minutes

Expected goals: 50%; 53rd pct
Shot attempts: 47.2%; 27th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 21 for, 19 against. Expected: 25.7 and 25.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

36th

Numbers

53rd

The two rank him within 17 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 70 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 · 68 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 68th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.01 a game
Distance: 2.12 miles a game
Hardest shot: 77.8 mph; 14th 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

2024-25 with TOR · 748 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, 2024-25

The club: TOR took 50.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.0% — 0.2 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 748 minutes at five-on-five — 33rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Morgan Rielly	43.3%	53.9%	51.1%
William Nylander	57.5%	45.2%	48.8%
Oliver Ekman-Larsson	51.9%	49.0%	49.9%

43.3% together, 53.9% for him apart and 51.1% for Rielly 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

104 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 20 feet. 49% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.