This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Tim Stützle

Thirty-nine goals at twenty-one, on 3.56 miles a game and the sixth-best close-range rate in the league.

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

2020-21	OTT	53	12	17	29	-18	14	4	0	2	111	10.8	15:44
2021-22	OTT	79	22	36	58	-27	37	7	1	4	176	12.5	18:25
2022-23	OTT	78	39	51	90	-3	54	10	3	3	228	17.1	21:16
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	210	73	104	177	-48	105	21	4	9	515	14.2	18:48

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

39 goals and 51 assists in 78 games — 90 points — at 21:16 a night. Minus-3, 228 shots at 17.1 per cent, ten on the power play, three shorthanded, 54 penalty minutes.

The two seasons before this read 29 points and 58. He was twenty when the third began.

54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 90th percentile, with his ice at 62-64 against an expectation of 58.59-49.6 — fourteen and a half goals worse than the chances at the defensive end, which on a club whose goaltending finished twenty-seventh in the league is the club as much as the man.

He started 59.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 90th percentile: 480 attacking draws against 325.

Three seasons, 210 games, 177 points.

The Finesse Game

228 shots at a median of 26 feet, and thirty-nine goals.

Inside twenty feet: 92 shots on goal and 26 goals — 28.26 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71, and the sixth-best close-range rate in the league among forwards who put sixty shots on goal from there. From twenty to forty: 98 shots and 14 goals, 14.29 per cent, against 11.05. Beyond forty: 39 shots and none at all.

Above the league from both ranges that matter and nothing whatever from the third, which is the correct shape and a very good version of it.

172 wrist shots and 55 snap out of 322 tracked attempts, with 47 slap. 94.9 mph at the 78th percentile, on that slap count, so the reading holds.

51 assists. The scoring and the passing arrived in the same season and neither of them is the reason to watch him.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 187, with 54 penalty minutes.

3.56 miles a game, the 98th percentile. Top speed 23.2 mph, the 90th. 2.6 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 94th. Top decile of the league in all three at twenty-one.

That is what makes the file what it is. Very few players in this book are in the ninetieth percentile of speed, sprints and mileage at once, and the ones who are tend to be the best in the league.

What is not there yet is the defensive half. Fourteen and a half goals past expectation on his ice is partly the goaltending and partly a twenty-one-year-old who leaves the zone early.

At 187 pounds he is knocked off pucks and does not win them back with contact. He wins them back by going and getting the next one.

The Intangibles

Third overall in 2020, out of Germany, and 177 points in 210 games by twenty-one.

The career plus-minus is minus-48, all of it accumulated on a club that has not made the playoffs in his time here, and this season’s minus-3 on a ninety-point year is the first sign of the club catching up to him.

He is the most valuable asset in this organisation and the tracking says so as loudly as the point total does. What the file cannot yet settle is the defensive record — and on a team whose goaltending gave back eighteen and a half goals, nobody’s is measurable this season.

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
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.

durable· was available
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
workhorse· carries the load at even strength
15:15 a game at five-on-five, 96th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.78) · 58% keep it
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“Very few players in this book are in the ninetieth percentile of speed, sprints and mileage at once, and the ones who are tend to be the best in the league.”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“51 assists. The scoring and the passing arrived in the same season and neither of them is the reason to watch him.”
hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“At 187 pounds he is knocked off pucks and does not win them back with contact.”
defensively-responsiblehe lacks it· comes back; can be trusted with a lead
“Fourteen and a half goals past expectation on his ice is partly the goaltending and partly a twenty-one-year-old who leaves the zone early.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,189 minutes

Expected goals: 54.2%; 82nd pct
Shot attempts: 55.1%; 90th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 62 for, 64 against. Expected: 58.6 and 49.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

97th

Numbers

82nd

The two rank him within 15 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 81 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, 2022-23 · 78 games

Top speed: 23.2 mph; 92nd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.63 a game
Distance: 3.56 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.9 mph; 92nd 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

2022-23 · 1189 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, 2022-23

The club: OTT took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.2% — 3.2 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,189 minutes at five-on-five — 82nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Brady Tkachuk	56.7%	40.8%	48.4%
Claude Giroux	55.5%	52.7%	54.0%
Thomas Chabot	55.2%	53.3%	49.3%

56.7% together, 40.8% for him apart and 48.4% for Tkachuk 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

323 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 40 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 39% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.