This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Zack Ostapchuk

Six-foot-four and 212 pounds, 45 penalty minutes in 56 games, and one goal.

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

2023-24	OTT	7	0	0	0	-1	0	0	0	0	5	0.0	10:30
2024-25	OTT/SJS	56	1	3	4	-8	45	0	0	0	26	3.9	9:25
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	63	1	3	4	-9	45	0	0	0	31	3.2	9:33

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

1 goal and 3 assists in 56 games across Ottawa and San Jose — 4 points at 9:25 a night, with 45 penalty minutes.

43.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 10th percentile, across 476 minutes. His ice went 6-16 against an expectation of 13.22-16.89 — seven goals of scoring that never arrived on a fourth line.

The Finesse Game

26 attempts in 56 games and 1 goal. There is nothing here yet: 4 points in 63 career NHL games.

41 per cent of his attempts came from inside 20 feet, which says he goes to the correct places. The hands have not caught up and the club is not asking them to.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 212 and this is the whole player. He forechecks hard, he is difficult to move from in front of a net, and he finishes checks on defencemen who do not enjoy it.

45 penalty minutes in 56 games is a high rate for a fourth-liner at nine minutes a night. He goes into the scrum and he does not let anything go.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick of Ottawa in 2021, traded to San Jose at the deadline in March in the deal that sent Fabian Zetterlund the other way.

63 NHL games. He is 22 and a bottom-six body on a club that has room for one to develop into something.

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

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.

forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks hard, he is difficult to move from in front of a net, and he finishes checks on defencemen who do not enjoy it.”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He forechecks hard, he is difficult to move from in front of a net, and he finishes checks on defencemen who do not enjoy it.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He forechecks hard, he is difficult to move from in front of a net, and he finishes checks on defencemen who do not enjoy it.”
retaliatesa strength· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty
“He goes into the scrum and he does not let anything go.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 476 minutes

Expected goals: 43.9%; 12th pct
Shot attempts: 45.7%; 16th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 6 for, 16 against. Expected: 13.2 and 16.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

13th

Numbers

12th

The two rank him within 1 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 65 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 · 56 games

Top speed: 23.3 mph; 94th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.86 a game
Distance: 1.59 miles a game
Hardest shot: 86.5 mph; 55th 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

2024-25 with OTT · 384 minutes at five-on-five

Noah Gregornow FLA47%
Michael Amadio31%
Matthew Highmoreoff the roster25%

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: SJS took 44.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.9% — 0.3 below the club he did it on.
The role: 476 minutes at five-on-five — 14th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Noah Gregor	40.7%	46.7%	39.5%
Tyler Kleven	36.7%	49.1%	46.2%
Thomas Chabot	41.7%	44.5%	53.2%

40.7% together, 46.7% for him apart and 39.5% for Gregor apart. He was better away from Gregor, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Gregor.

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

44 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 23 feet. 41% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 11% from beyond forty.