Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ryan Shea
Edmonton Oilers Defense #6
A fourth-round pick who spent 6 years in the minors and then, at 28, played 80 games and was plus-30.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-24 | PIT | 31 | 1 | 0 | 1 | +1 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 17 | 5.9 | 12:37 |
| 2024-25 | PIT | 39 | 2 | 3 | 5 | -9 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 19 | 10.5 | 16:44 |
| 2025-26 | PIT | 80 | 6 | 29 | 35 | +30 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 72 | 8.3 | 18:53 |
| 2026-27 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 150 | 9 | 32 | 41 | +22 | 42 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 108 | 8.3 | 17:02 |
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
6 goals and 35 points in 80 games for Pittsburgh, plus-30, on just under 19 minutes a night. For a player with 150 career games to his name at the start of it, that is a genuinely surprising season.
The Finesse Game
The numbers say a puck-mover and the usage says a second-pair defenseman, which is not what anyone projected for him. 35 points from a player who takes no power-play time means it came at even strength, off breakouts and second assists rather than from anything flashy.
He is a good enough skater to defend the rush and to retrieve under a forecheck. Nothing about his game is spectacular; the value is in doing the simple things at NHL speed without hesitating, which is precisely the skill that keeps career minor-leaguers in the minors.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 200, which is average for the position now. He defends positionally rather than physically and is not going to punish anybody in front of the net.
The Intangibles
The honest caveat with a season like this is that plus-minus flatters a defenseman on a team that controlled play, and a single strong year at 28 is not the same as an established level. He has done it once.
The upside is that late bloomers of this type — sound, simple, unafraid — often hold their level for years once they find it. Edmonton is paying a depth price to find out.
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
80 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 · 1,296 minutes
- Expected goals
- 52.4%
- 74th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.9%
- 45th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 77 for, 55 against. Expected: 59.6 and 54.2.
The eye and the numbers
SightedThe two rank him within 19 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.
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 — 73 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 · 80 games
- Top speed
- 21.6 mph
- 47th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.34 a game
- Distance
- 2.53 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.4 mph
- 38th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 88.9
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
8
points in his last 10 games — 2 goals, 6 assists, 8 shots
Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.
Usual linemates
2025-26 with PIT · 1296 minutes at five-on-five
- Kris Letang45%
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
- PIT took 51.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.4% — 0.6 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,296 minutes at five-on-five — 88th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kris Letang | 48.3% | 55.9% | 51.6% |
| Thomas Novak | 61.2% | 48.3% | 51.6% |
| Anthony Mantha | 52.1% | 52.5% | 50.0% |
48.3% together, 55.9% for him apart and 51.6% for Letang 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
125 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 40 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 63% from beyond forty.