Rodrigo Abols

A 29-year-old rookie from Latvia who took 51 per cent of his shot attempts from inside 20 feet.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI
2024-25	PHI	22	2	3	5	-10	4	0	0	0	25	8.0	9:11
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	22	2	3	5	-10	4	0	0	0	25	8.0	9:11

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

2 goals and 3 assists in 22 games — 5 points at 9:11 a night, minus-10, on 4 penalty minutes. They were the first NHL games of his life, at 29.

48.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 56th percentile, across 201 minutes. His ice went 7-17 against an expectation of 8.40-8.76, which on that sample is a goaltending statistic and nothing else.

The Finesse Game

25 attempts at a median of 18 feet with 51 per cent of them from inside 20 — the shortest shot profile of any forward here. He gets to the net and takes what is available in the paint.

There is very little skill beyond that. 3 assists in 22 games, and the passing is limited to the simple option.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 206 and a genuinely large body in the middle of the ice. He forechecks properly, he protects the puck below the goal line, and he is difficult to move once he is set.

4 penalty minutes in 22 games. He is disciplined and he is not an agitator; the size is used structurally rather than to provoke.

The Intangibles

A seventh-round pick of Vancouver in 2016 who never signed, spent eight seasons in Sweden and Finland, and came to North America at 28.

Twenty-two NHL games at 29. He is a fourth-line centre and a thirteenth forward, and the only thing worth saying about the file is that almost nobody gets here that way.

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
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.

net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He gets to the net and takes what is available in the paint.”
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“He forechecks properly, he protects the puck below the goal line, and he is difficult to move once he is set.”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He forechecks properly, he protects the puck below the goal line, and he is difficult to move once he is set.”
agitatorhe lacks it· gets under the skin; draws the retaliation
“He is disciplined and he is not an agitator; the size is used structurally rather than to provoke.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 201 minutes

Expected goals: 48.9%; 44th pct
Shot attempts: 48.3%; 36th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 7 for, 17 against. Expected: 8.4 and 8.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

17th

Numbers

44th

The numbers rank him 27 points above where the report does. 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. 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 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 · 22 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 47th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.77 a game
Distance: 1.52 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.5 mph; 36th 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 · 201 minutes at five-on-five

Nicolas Deslauriers42%
Olle Lycksellnow OTT28%
Garnet Hathaway22%

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: PHI took 52.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.9% — 3.2 below the club he did it on.
The role: 201 minutes at five-on-five — 0th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jamie Drysdale	30.0%	61.5%	52.0%
Nicolas Deslauriers	39.8%	55.2%	46.0%
Travis Sanheim	57.8%	41.1%	53.2%

30.0% together, 61.5% for him apart and 52.0% for Drysdale 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

35 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 50 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.