Zach Whitecloud

Undrafted, a Stanley Cup, 20 minutes a night, and no offence whatsoever.

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

2017-18	VGK	1	0	0	0	+3	0	0	0	0	0	—	16:42
2019-20	VGK	16	0	1	1	+3	4	0	0	0	9	0.0	14:19
2020-21	VGK	51	2	10	12	+9	24	0	0	1	54	3.7	17:49
2021-22	VGK	59	8	11	19	+21	20	0	1	1	94	8.5	18:48
2022-23	VGK	59	5	7	12	+10	41	0	0	1	64	7.8	17:07
2023-24	VGK	61	2	12	14	-3	32	0	0	1	51	3.9	17:35
2024-25	VGK	74	4	9	13	+7	37	0	0	0	72	5.6	17:31
2025-26	VGK/CGY	78	2	15	17	-6	30	0	0	0	67	3.0	20:19
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	399	23	65	88	+44	188	0	1	4	411	5.6	18:07

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

2 goals and 15 assists in 78 games, minus-6, at 20:19 a night. His 5-on-5 work was done in Vegas.

The Finesse Game

None to speak of, by design. 101 unblocked attempts from a median of 53 feet with 5 per cent inside 20, and 2 goals. 23 goals in 399 career games.

He makes the simple pass and defends. That is the job description in full.

The Physical Game

6-2, 210, and hard to play against without being reckless. 30 penalty minutes in 78 games of top-4 defensive work is excellent discipline. He blocks shots, boxes out, and kills penalties.

The Intangibles

The on-ice numbers were poor — 47.1 per cent of the expected goals, 29th percentile, with the goals 49-59 against across nearly 1,400 minutes — but they were poor while facing the other team’s best on a club that asked him to.

An undrafted defenceman from Manitoba with 399 NHL games and a Stanley Cup ring, which is a career almost nobody takes that route to.

He is 29 and arrives to give a young Calgary blue line somebody who has done it properly. On a team this poor, the value is in what he shows Parekh and Brzustewicz rather than what the results say.

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 · 1,397 minutes

Expected goals: 47.1%; 30th pct
Shot attempts: 48.9%; 45th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 49 for, 59 against. Expected: 51.8 and 58.1.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

11th

Numbers

30th

The two rank him within 19 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 — 64 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: 21.3 mph; 37th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.45 a game
Distance: 2.81 miles a game
Hardest shot: 94.0 mph; 73rd 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 — 0 goals, 5 assists, 9 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 with VGK · 785 minutes at five-on-five

Noah Hanifin57%
Ben Huttonoff the roster19%
Jeremy Lauzon14%

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: CGY took 47.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.1% — 0.1 above the club he did it on.
The role: 1,397 minutes at five-on-five — 92nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Noah Hanifin	51.9%	45.1%	56.2%
Kevin Bahl	46.7%	47.3%	43.7%
Mikael Backlund	45.1%	47.6%	48.0%

51.9% together, 45.1% for him apart and 56.2% for Hanifin apart. He was the one being carried: the share went with Hanifin and did not follow 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

101 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 63 feet. 5% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 75% from beyond forty.