Taylor Ward
Los Angeles Kings Right Wing
An undrafted winger who reached the NHL at 27 and spent last season proving he can hold a fourth-line job.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-25 | LAK | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 25.0 | 14:52 |
| 2025-26 | LAK | 36 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 38 | 7.9 | 9:28 |
| 2026-27 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 37 | 4 | 4 | 8 | 0 | 7 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 42 | 9.5 | 9:37 |
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
3 goals and 7 points in 36 games on 9 and a half minutes a night, even on the plus-minus. That is a fourth-liner’s line in a fourth-liner’s role, and for a player with 37 career games it is a foothold.
The Finesse Game
Modest and unpretentious. 38 shots in 36 games, most of them from close range, and the hands are functional around the net rather than dangerous. He is not going to create offence and is not being asked to.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 215, and he plays a simple, physical forechecking game — get in on the defenceman, finish the check, change. That is the entirety of the job description and he does it without error.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, a long route through college and the minors, and an NHL debut at an age when most players have either arrived or gone. Nothing about his game depends on speed or skill that will decline soon.
There is not much projection here beyond the obvious: he is a thirteenth forward who does not hurt his team, which on a deep roster is a job worth having.
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.
- hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
33% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 9th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 324 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.2%
- 65th pct
- Shot attempts
- 49.8%
- 55th 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: 11 for, 11 against. Expected: 11.7 and 11.2.
The eye and the numbers
SightedThe two rank him within 16 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 — 72 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 · 36 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 42nd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.92 a game
- Distance
- 1.49 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.3 mph
- 93rd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 83.6
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
3
points in his last 10 games — 1 goals, 2 assists, 14 shots
Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.
Usual linemates
2025-26 · 324 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, 2025-26
- The club
- LAK took 51.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.2% — 0.7 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 324 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samuel Helenius | 57.7% | 40.0% | 42.8% |
| Jeff Malott | 56.9% | 45.2% | 54.2% |
| Brian Dumoulin | 48.1% | 53.1% | 50.3% |
57.7% together, 40.0% for him apart and 42.8% for Helenius apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
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
71 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 30 feet. 30% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 25% from beyond forty.