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

Rasmus Dahlin

68 points and a 52.9 per cent chance share, and the only Buffalo skater who consistently tilts the ice.

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

2018-19	BUF	82	9	35	44	-13	34	5	0	4	177	5.1	21:09
2019-20	BUF	59	4	36	40	-7	38	2	0	1	90	4.4	19:18
2020-21	BUF	56	5	18	23	-36	26	1	0	0	115	4.3	21:36
2021-22	BUF	80	13	40	53	-22	68	3	0	3	170	7.6	24:01
2022-23	BUF	78	15	58	73	+12	92	6	0	2	204	7.3	25:48
2023-24	BUF	81	20	39	59	-3	66	6	0	2	235	8.5	25:25
2024-25	BUF	73	17	51	68	+11	54	5	0	1	200	8.5	24:14
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	509	83	277	360	-58	378	28	0	13	1191	7.0	23:16

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

17 goals and 51 assists in 73 games for 68 points, plus-11, on 24:14 a night and 200 shots — the heaviest workload on the club and the most points by a distance.

53.6 per cent at five-on-five, the 82nd percentile, and the only figure on this roster above the 70th. His on-ice goals were 65-47 against an expected 57-49, so he was outscored while creating 7 more than he allowed. That is a goaltending problem, not a defenceman one.

The Finesse Game

The skating is elite and the puck game is built on it. He escapes pressure by changing direction rather than by outrunning it, carries out of his own zone as a matter of course, and joins the rush as a fourth attacker rather than a trailer.

200 shots from the blue line is a genuine volume and 17 goals from it is a real return. 51 assists is where the value concentrates — he is a defenceman who runs a power play and a breakout equally well, which is rare.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 204, and more physical than most defencemen with this much skill. He finishes checks, defends his net front, and does not avoid the corners.

54 penalty minutes is a high total and part of it is a captain playing 24 minutes on a club that loses. The durability has been reasonable — 73 games, and he has cleared 70 in five of seven seasons.

The Intangibles

The 1st overall pick, the captaincy at 23, and seven seasons without a playoff game. He has never publicly asked to leave and the question follows him anyway.

He is a genuine top-five defenceman in the league on a club that has not built anything around him. At 25 with a long contract, the organisation’s entire credibility rests on whether the next three seasons look different from the last seven.

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
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.

drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
53.6% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 44.8% for his club in the minutes he sat: +8.8, 99th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He escapes pressure by changing direction rather than by outrunning it, carries out of his own zone as a matter of course, and joins the rush as a fourth attacker rather than a trailer.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“51 assists is where the value concentrates — he is a defenceman who runs a power play and a breakout equally well, which is rare.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He finishes checks, defends his net front, and does not avoid the corners.”
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“defends his net front”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“The 1st overall pick, the captaincy at 23, and seven seasons without a playoff game.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,293 minutes

Expected goals: 53.6%; 82nd pct
Shot attempts: 55%; 91st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 65 for, 47 against. Expected: 57.0 and 49.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

96th

Numbers

82nd

The two rank him within 14 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 — 83 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 · 73 games

Top speed: 21.8 mph; 56th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.48 a game
Distance: 3.72 miles a game
Hardest shot: 99.3 mph; 96th 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 · 1293 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: BUF took 47.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.6% — 5.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,293 minutes at five-on-five — 91st percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Bowen Byram	54.7%	52.6%	44.3%
Tage Thompson	53.9%	53.4%	48.3%
John-Jason Peterka	54.8%	53.0%	42.4%

54.7% together, 52.6% for him apart and 44.3% for Byram apart. Byram was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Byram than for him.

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

274 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 17 of them goals. His median goal came from 30 feet. 8% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 70% from beyond forty.