Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2026-27 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 2026-27 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

William Eklund

Photo by Jesse Kornblum, CC BY-SA 4.0

William Eklund

Ottawa Senators Left Wing #27

Minus 31 in San Jose, and dead level in the chances.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22SJS9044-3200080.014:20
2022-23SJS8213-560001811.119:50
2023-24SJS80162945-453080512812.518:40
2024-25SJS77174158-72961215111.319:33
2025-26SJS78153853-31323011768.518:32
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—25250113163-9199171848110.418:47

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

15 goals and 38 assists in 78 games — 53 points, minus-31, at 18:32 a night. His 5-on-5 work was done in San Jose.

The Finesse Game

A playmaker first: 113 assists in 252 career games is a genuine first-line rate, and it comes from patience with the puck on the half-wall rather than from speed.

The shooting has improved sharply. 246 unblocked attempts with 48 per cent from inside 20 feet, median 20 — good ice, and 16 goals out of it.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 185 pounds, and light. 32 penalty minutes. He does not win wall battles and does not go to the net front except to shoot.

The Intangibles

The minus-31 is one of the worst figures in this edition and the chances underneath were exactly level — 46.2 for and 46.6 against, a flat 50 per cent share and 53rd percentile.

San Jose’s goaltending came in 37 goals worse than the chances it faced, third-worst in the league. That is the whole of the minus.

He is 24, the seventh pick in 2021, and arrives on a club that finished 1st in expected goals against — the exact opposite structure. The playmaking will travel. The plus-minus was never his.

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

    78 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 · 1,130 minutes

Expected goals
49.8%
53rd pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
50.2%
60th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 47 for, 62 against. Expected: 46.1 and 46.6.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
55th
Numbers
53rd

The two rank him within 2 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 — 73 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 · 78 games

Top speed
22.3 mph
53rd pct

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

Bursts over 20 mph
1.42 a game

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

Distance
2.94 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
89.3 mph
79th pct

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

10

points in his last 10 games — 3 goals, 7 assists, 18 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 with SJS · 1130 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
SJS took 47.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.8% — 2.4 above the club he did it on.
The role
Second line, 1,130 minutes at five-on-five — 75th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Alexander Wennberg49.7%49.9%44.2%
Mario Ferraro50.5%49.3%45.0%
Dmitry Orlov50.0%49.6%49.8%

49.7% together, 49.9% for him apart and 44.2% for Wennberg apart. Wennberg was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Wennberg 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

246 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 16 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 49% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.