Vasily Podkolzin

A tenth-overall pick who looked like a bust in Vancouver and has quietly turned into exactly the winger a skill team needs.

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

2021-22	VAN	79	14	12	26	+7	26	2	0	3	115	12.2	12:48
2022-23	VAN	39	4	3	7	-5	9	0	0	0	41	9.8	11:50
2023-24	VAN	19	0	2	2	-4	8	0	0	0	20	0.0	10:49
2024-25	EDM	82	8	16	24	+1	48	0	0	2	114	7.0	13:13
2025-26	EDM	82	19	18	37	+16	63	1	0	5	139	13.7	15:23
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	301	45	51	96	+15	154	3	0	10	429	10.5	13:22

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

19 goals and 37 points in all 82 games, plus-16, with 63 penalty minutes — comfortably the best season of his career and the first one that looked like the player Vancouver thought it was drafting.

The Finesse Game

The hands are honest middle-6 hands. He is not going to beat a defenseman one-on-one in open ice, and the shot is good rather than dangerous — most of his goals come from within 15 feet, off rebounds, deflections and loose pucks he has personally created.

What he does well is arrive. He plays a straight-line game up the wall, gets the puck deep, and is on the defenseman before the retrieval is finished. Playing with skilled centers, that is worth more than a soft pair of hands, because the pucks he wins back go directly to people who know what to do with them.

The skating is heavy-legged and quick enough. He is not a burner but nothing about his game requires him to be.

The Physical Game

This is the reason he plays. He finishes every check available to him, he is genuinely strong along the wall for a man of ordinary size, and he plays with an edge that gets under people without costing his team much — 63 penalty minutes is a lot for a middle-6 winger and almost none of it was stupid.

The Intangibles

The story on him coming out of Russia was of a hard-nosed power winger with unfinished skill, and the disappointment in Vancouver was a confidence problem as much as anything. In Edmonton he was given a simple job and has done it without complication, which is often what a stalled career actually needs.

He is unlikely to score much more than he did last year. He also does not need to.

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
82 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 · 1,150 minutes

Expected goals: 52.1%; 71st pct
Shot attempts: 53.3%; 83rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 59 for, 45 against. Expected: 52.2 and 48.1.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

89th

Numbers

71st

The two rank him within 18 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 — 80 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 23.1 mph; 88th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.33 a game
Distance: 2.58 miles a game
Hardest shot: 91.1 mph; 87th 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 — 3 goals, 3 assists, 22 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1150 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: EDM took 51.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.1% — 0.5 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,150 minutes at five-on-five — 78th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Leon Draisaitl	51.4%	52.9%	58.6%
Darnell Nurse	51.6%	52.4%	48.2%
Evan Bouchard	57.3%	48.7%	58.4%

51.4% together, 52.9% for him apart and 58.6% for Draisaitl apart. Draisaitl was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more 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

183 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 19 of them goals. His median goal came from 17 feet. 43% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.