Armchair Hockey Scout

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2025-26 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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48

Tyson Kozak

Buffalo Sabres Center

21 games, 5 points, and a fourth-line centre getting his first look at 22.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2024-25BUF21325-221001127.310:29
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—21325-221001127.310:29

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

3 goals and 2 assists in 21 games for 5 points, minus-2, on 10:29 a night.

3 goals on 11 shots is 27 per cent, in twenty-one games, and means precisely nothing. 63 per cent of his attempts came from inside 20 feet, which is the more interesting line: in a very small sample he only shot from the paint.

The Finesse Game

Limited at this level and honestly presented. 11 shots in 21 games is almost no volume, and there is no playmaking on show.

He plays a simple, direct game — win the draw, get it deep, retrieve it — and does not attempt anything the shift does not offer, which is the correct way for a fourth-line centre to arrive.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 185, and willing rather than heavy. He finishes checks and supports the puck, and he is not going to win a battle against a defenceman by force.

2 penalty minutes in 21 games. Too small a sample to read.

The Intangibles

A seventh-round pick, four years of junior, three of the American League, and a first NHL look at 22 — a career built entirely out of persistence.

The realistic ceiling is a fourth-line centre who kills penalties. On this roster that job is genuinely available, which is more than most seventh-round picks get.

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
  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary
  • 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.

  • faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it

    “He plays a simple, direct game — win the draw, get it deep, retrieve it — and does not attempt anything the shift does not offer, which is the correct way for a fourth-line centre to arrive.”

  • playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “11 shots in 21 games is almost no volume, and there is no playmaking on show.”

  • punishingpresent and ordinary· finishes checks; hurts people legally

    “5-11 and 185, and willing rather than heavy. He finishes checks and supports the puck, and he is not going to win a battle against a defenceman by force.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “he is not going to win a battle against a defenceman by force”

  • penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short

    “The realistic ceiling is a fourth-line centre who kills penalties.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 211 minutes

Expected goals
44.4%
14th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
42.9%
5th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 5 for, 6 against. Expected: 5.9 and 7.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
36th
Numbers
14th

The report ranks him 22 points above where the numbers do. 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 — 70 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 · 21 games

Top speed
22.6 mph
67th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
1.81 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
1.79 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
92.3 mph
89th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.9

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.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 211 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, 2024-25

The club
BUF took 47.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.4% — 3.5 below the club he did it on.
The role
211 minutes at five-on-five — 1st percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Sam Lafferty45.5%43.9%41.9%
Bowen Byram44.7%44.2%48.9%
Owen Power51.4%40.7%47.0%

45.5% together, 43.9% for him apart and 41.9% for Lafferty apart. Lafferty was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Lafferty than for him.

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

27 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 63% of his shots came from inside twenty feet.