The NHL Scouting Report 2026
New to HockeyStats.com: Over 300 Eye Test-Based NHL Player Guides
The NHL Scouting Report section of HockeyStats.com is now live, featuring 300+ reports (and counting).
In my time writing about the NHL, I’ve noticed something a bit frustrating about how the game is covered. If a player is chosen in the top few rounds of the draft, chances are that they have had thousands of words written detailing the most intricate aspects of their game. They may have a less than 10% chance of actually establishing themselves as a full-time player, but if you want to learn about their shot, their vision, their physicality, and their skating in extreme detail, that information is out there. But once that player has actually made the NHL, that pretty much stops. Maybe, if the player is notable enough, a staff writer at EliteProspects will check in on their game and provide some status updates in the first year or two of their career. Maybe a Substack writer or YouTube channel will watch and break down a bit of their tape. But for the most part, for any given player — even if they play at the top of their team’s lineup and are being actively bandied about in trade or free agent talks — what you can find online about how they play the game will be vague and most likely informed more by hockey card stats than detailed viewings. “He’s a 20-goal guy… he brings size at 6’3… he can play 23 minutes a night… he wins faceoffs…. etc.”
For example, take Morgan Rielly. If you’re a non-Leafs fan who wants to understand how Rielly plays the game and you want to go a bit further than counting stats and analytics-based player cards, there’s not a lot out there for you. You can find his 2012 scouting reports, a great Lauren Kelly article from 2021, some HFBoards discussions, and a whole lot of articles that refer vaguely to good puck moving, iffy defence, and varying production. This is a player who’s been the #1 defenceman on the league’s most popular team for over a decade! Contrast that with Theodor Hallquisth, a defenceman drafted by the Wild last summer who many consider to be a longshot to ever make the NHL, about whom you can read seven pages of detailed reports from EliteProspects, a film study from HockeyWilderness, a lengthy profile from the Hockey Writers, and good summaries from the Athletic among several other analyses.
Scouts in the public sphere focus on prospects. This makes sense considering the demand for prospect analysis as well as their own career aspirations, but the result is that there simply isn’t a resource that gives you that eye test perspective on NHL players1, and most hockey fans do not have enough free time to do extensive isolated viewings of every player who their team may potentially acquire.
About a year or so ago, I began a project to change that. What I knew that I wanted was a guide to NHL players that had no explicit reference to any stats. While I could use stats, especially tracked microstats, to guide my analysis, I couldn’t fall back on rattling off metrics or vaguely alluding to “he drives offence” or “he is in the top 5th percentile in zone entries,” etc. This project would need to be primarily based on actually sitting down and watching these players.
I was dealing with obvious limitations here. I played (and play), but not at an elite level by any stretch, and many of the technical intricacies of skating stride, shot mechanics, etc. are well beyond my range (as anybody who has watched my men’s league team is well aware). While many of these reports are detailed, they are more concerned with outputs than inputs, habits and styles than biological analysis. This is a weakness, but I think it’s less consequential when talking about NHLers than prospects with years of development ahead of them.
This is more the perspective of a well-informed fan and analyst (with considerably more resources than most people at his disposal) than a professional pro scout. Through my work at EliteProspects I have access to tools that make watching archived game tape and player shifts much, much easier. I also have full access to their archives of scouting reports and draft guides, not to mention a staff of smart hockey people to discuss players with (and a spiffy branded scouting notebook).
Things can slip through the cracks from just watching game tape, and there’s a reason prospect sites bring on teams of writers to bounce ideas off one another. With that in mind, I picked the brains of smart hockey people for their opinions and also cross-referenced with other writing I could find on some players from resources like Hockey Tactics, the AllThreeZones blog, McKeen’s and videos from YouTube channels like the Hockey PDOcast, Along the Ice, Hockey Psychology, and Virtual Hockey Scout. Once I had written the reports, I also validated many of them with credentialed beat reporters to get their input and make sure I hadn’t missed or misrepresented anything.
It also might go without saying that the biggest resource requirement for this project was time; there’s a reason it took a year to get this off the ground. Between watching isolated shift tapes, taking notes while watching games, and doing the actual writing - which so far has totalled over 40,000 words2 - this project has basically been humming in the background of all my other hockey work for the past two seasons. Working on the EP U23 project, writing deadline and free agency previews, analyzing Olympic rosters, ranking the top 20 players at each position before the season began, etc. was all done hand-in-hand with getting more viewings and reports in. There was also a frustrating Sisyphean aspect, which was that some of the first players I wrote about required major revisions on their reports by the time 2026 rolled around (congrats to Bedard on the improved skating speed).
The result, after all this hard work, is a set of over 300 NHL player reports - at the moment, 208 forwards and 95 defencemen.
All of these reports are available to HockeyStats subscribers at the $10 level (who will also gain access to 2025-26 microstat player cards this week).
These reports aren’t exhaustive. They’re relatively bite-sized, ranging from about 100-400 words. I figured that this was the way to go, in part for my own sanity but also to make them concise and approachable for readers. They’re meant to hit on the important points of a player’s game, the key strengths and weaknesses, and paint a picture of the skills and patterns that you can expect to see when watching them. There might be stuff I’ve missed, especially for players who have taken major strides or suddenly struggled recently. But overall I think it should give a good overview, and I’ve received good feedback.
The project isn’t done yet. As a start, I would like to have a report for every player with 2000+ minutes played in 24/25 + 25/26 combined by the end of the offseason (which will probably be about 100 more). Additionally, of course, further edits and updates will be required as players progress (or regress), and oftentimes I do add a few sentences or changes after watching a game. We’ve also looked into bringing in guest contributors who can provide a different perspective and maybe help add some reports for players further down the lineup.
I hope you enjoy and find value in this resource. Building it has taught me a lot about the league’s players and the game itself, and I am very glad to have finally filled this 2+ decade gap in the public hockey sphere.
Other New HockeyStats.com Features:
Redesigned game pages
Trade Deadline WAR Roster Builder
PWHL Stats
Light Mode
There used to be, though. From 1990-91 to 2003-04, reporter Sherry Ross authored the Hockey Scouting Report series of books, which provided an in-depth guide to hundreds of players, detailing their strengths and weaknesses and offering projections of what to expect in the coming season. Some of these books are available in one form or another online, and their insights were a valuable asset in the History of Hockey Top 80 Defencemen project (as well as enjoyable and nostalgic reading).
I want to be absolutely explicit here that this project involved zero use of AI whatsoever.
You had me at no AI.