Sam Rinzel

6-4 at 21, 18 minutes a night, and no evidence yet in either direction.

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

2024-25	CHI	9	0	5	5	+1	0	0	0	0	22	0.0	23:22
2025-26	CHI	54	4	10	14	-7	44	0	0	1	83	4.8	18:16
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	63	4	15	19	-6	44	0	0	1	105	3.8	18:60

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

4 goals and 10 assists in 54 games, minus-7, at 18:16 a night. His first real NHL season, at 21.

The Finesse Game

Long, mobile and unfinished. The skating is good for 6-4 and the club clearly believes he can move a puck, which is why he plays 18 minutes.

The production is not there: 130 unblocked attempts from a median of 50 feet, 5 per cent inside 20, 4 goals. 10 assists in 54 games.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 194 pounds, which is very light for the frame, and it shows in front of the net. 44 penalty minutes says he competes; the strength to finish those battles has not arrived.

2 summers of weight is the obvious and unglamorous answer.

The Intangibles

43.8 per cent of the expected goals, 5th percentile, with the goals 36-39 against in 856 minutes.

The same caveat applies as to every Blackhawk and it is wearing thin by this point in the section: the club was last in the league and every young defenceman here is being played above his station because there is nobody else.

He is 21, a first-round pick, 63 career games. There is not enough here to grade honestly and the games he is getting are not the kind that produce evidence. Ask again when there is a defence around him.

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.

sheltered· is started in the attacking end
58% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 90th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 856 minutes

Expected goals: 43.8%; 10th pct
Shot attempts: 44.8%; 11th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 39 against. Expected: 31.9 and 41.0.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

19th

Numbers

10th

Blind

33rd

The two rank him within 9 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.

The same player was graded a second time from his biography and his box score alone, with the measured record withheld. That reading lands 23 points from the numbers; this one lands 9. Across the whole control the two distances come out the same, which is worth knowing in both directions: the arithmetic on both sides of the sighted reading did not buy it any accuracy, and it did not cost it any either.

All three 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 — 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, 2025-26 · 54 games

Top speed: 22.0 mph; 62nd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.48 a game
Distance: 2.72 miles a game
Hardest shot: 85.7 mph; 26th 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 1 goals, 0 assists, 13 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 856 minutes at five-on-five

Wyatt Kaiser44%
Alex Vlasic27%
Matt Grzelcykoff the roster17%

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: CHI took 43.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.8% — 0.6 above the club he did it on.
The role: 856 minutes at five-on-five — 43rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Wyatt Kaiser	44.6%	43.2%	43.7%
Connor Bedard	43.9%	43.8%	43.4%
Andre Burakovsky	47.1%	42.4%	45.1%

44.6% together, 43.2% for him apart and 43.7% for Kaiser apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

130 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 28 feet. 5% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 70% from beyond forty.