Returning regular · 2025-26
Liam O'Brien
Utah Mammoth · C · L shot · age 32 at the dated snapshot.
- Team
- UTA
- Lane
- C
- Age
- 32
Production and deployment
How the points were built
Official NHL 2025–26 regular-season reports. A missing split stays “—”; it is never converted to zero.
Organizational context
7 C regulars in UTA
The all-team median is 7. UTA’s farm system ranks #3 in the maintained two-board consensus.
Questions a GM still has to answer
- How much of the scoring comes at five-on-five, on special teams, or into an empty net?
- Is the player creating the play, finishing it, or receiving a secondary point?
- Does deployment reveal trust, scarcity, underuse, or a role the roster cannot offer?
- What contract, acquisition cost, development alternative and Cup-window effect complete the argument?
Tonight
UTA do not play today
League schedule for 2026-09-29; next league date 2026-09-30.
Nothing listed against him.
White noise · as of 2026-09-29 · social 2026-09-29
Liam O'Brien is talked about more than most (86th percentile); attention this week is 2.69× his usual
How much he is being talked about: the league's own stories tagged to him, daily pageviews of his Wikipedia article against his own 90-day baseline, posts naming him on the connected networks (Bluesky), and the roster moves and listings that make noise. A measure of attention. Whether it affects a player is his business, and a question the history will let us test later.
Social: 36 posts named him this week on Bluesky · 36 likes, reposts and replies · no baseline yet, it needs a week of readings.
Contract · UTA
$1.00M cap hit
2024–25 through 2026–27 · UFA at expiry. Reported
Role question › Costs more per point than the position median and is below the line on five-on-five creation and penalty-kill use. Either the contract or the deployment needs a look.
- He did not reach the five-on-five sample (20 games and 10:00 a night at five-on-five), so the rate test cannot pass.
- At 1.0% of the cap, almost any NHL production is surplus.
- 8 real points at this cap hit would pass the cost test (he had 4).
- A five-on-five rate of 1.68 per 60 (he had no qualifying sample) or a regular penalty-kill role (1:00+ a night) would pass the Cup side.
Shot quality · 2025-26
Expected goals
CapOrCup's shot model (distance, angle, shot type, strength, rebounds, rushes), trained on 2023-24 and 2024-25 and tested on unseen games (AUC 0.756). Finishing is goals minus expected goals; it is noisy in one season.
Advanced scoring · 2025-26
Goals, assists and plus/minus, weighted by what they changed
Every goal counts the win probability it added, scaled so the average goal is 1.0: a late tying goal counts several, a goal at 6-1 or into an empty net late counts little. Plus/minus also credits the players on the ice when the goal's sequence began.
From the video · model judgement
What the condensed games showed
Read from the league's free condensed games (1 game so far): entries, exits, battles and turnovers the model could see and attribute to his jersey number. A condensed game is a sample of the game, so these are observations, not season counts.
Career arc · era-adjusted points per 82 games
Liam O'Brien, season by season
Each dot is one season. The amber bar is what his earlier seasons and his age predicted for that season (80% band), so a dot far above its bar is a season the numbers did not see coming. The shaded band is where most players at his position sit at each age.
Position band: quantile regression (10th/50th/90th) of qualifying seasons on an age spline, weighted for players who drop out.
What the numbers found
No shipped label applies. A label is a measured finding about a run of seasons (for example, a spike that came back to the old level), and it is shown only for label types that passed their test on held-out seasons.
Projection at the draft
No draft projection: projections exist for players drafted from 2005 on who have season lines on file.
Every season
| Season | Age | GP | Level | Expected (80%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | 20 | 13 | 13.3 | 8.1 to 77.5 |
| 2016-17 | 22 | 1 | 0.0 | −45.9 to 110.2 |
| 2017-18 | 23 | 3 | 0.0 | −16.1 to 81.4 |
| 2020-21 | 26 | 12 | 20.1 | −7.5 to 60.9 |
| 2021-22 | 27 | 39 | 5.8 | −1.2 to 44.4 |
| 2022-23 | 28 | 56 | 14.6 | −9.1 to 25.8 |
| 2023-24 | 29 | 75 | 14.1 | −5.2 to 26.0 |
| 2024-25 | 30 | 28 | 5.5 | −9.0 to 28.7 |
| 2025-26 | 31 | 38 | 8.0 | −13.7 to 22.7 |
Source: CapOrCup careers desk (method and league curves) · as of 2026-09-29
Comparables at the same age
Who looked like this at 28 to 31
Careers are compared as league-adjusted points per game by age, over the same ages. The comparables below are the closest lines, and what matters is the spread of what they did next, not any single name.
This player so far: age 15 SMHL 0.93 → age 16 QMJHL 0.16 → age 17 QMJHL 0.40 → age 18 QMJHL 0.37 → age 19 QMJHL 0.52 → age 20 NHL 0.15 → age 21 AHL 0.27 → age 22 AHL 0.47 → age 23 AHL 0.38 → age 24 AHL 0.38 → age 25 AHL 0.49 → age 26 NHL 0.25 → age 27 NHL 0.08 → age 28 NHL 0.20 → age 29 NHL 0.19 → age 30 NHL 0.07 → age 31 NHL 0.10
| Player | Distance (lower is closer) | What he did afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Justin DowlingC · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.09 | age 32 AHL 0.37 → age 33 AHL 0.32 → age 34 NHL 0.14 → age 35 AHL 0.29 |
| Nicolas DeslauriersL · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.09 | age 32 NHL 0.15 → age 33 NHL 0.07 → age 34 NHL 0.10 → age 35 NHL 0.04 |
| Tyler PitlickC · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.11 | age 32 NHL 0.12 → age 33 AHL 0.35 → age 34 NHL 0.06 |
| Scott SabourinR · matched at ages 29, 30, 31 | 0.14 | age 32 AHL 0.17 → age 33 NHL 0.19 |
| Sean KuralyC · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.17 | age 32 NHL 0.21 → age 33 NHL 0.27 |
| Casey CizikasC · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.17 | age 32 NHL 0.26 → age 33 NHL 0.33 → age 34 NHL 0.21 → age 35 NHL 0.22 |
| Garnet HathawayR · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.17 | age 32 NHL 0.21 → age 33 NHL 0.31 → age 34 NHL 0.04 |
| Nic DowdC · matched at ages 28, 29, 30, 31 | 0.19 | age 32 NHL 0.39 → age 33 NHL 0.34 → age 34 NHL 0.33 → age 35 NHL 0.29 |
Reading it
If most comparables became NHL regulars and their later peak sits well above this player's current line, the numbers say there is room to grow. If most did not, the numbers say the odds are against it. Either way it is what the data shows, not a name chosen to flatter.
Goal archive ·
Every goal, with the league's video
Preseason, regular season and playoffs are kept apart. Each row links to the NHL's own highlight page; no video is hosted here. Where a clip has been reviewed, the reading of it is a model judgement of the frames, not a measurement.
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Availability
Games missed
The NHL publishes no injury feed. This counts games his club played while he did not dress, for any reason: injury, illness, a healthy scratch, a suspension or a trade gap. No cause is claimed.
NHL EDGE tracking · 2025-26
Speed, shot and ice
From the NHL's own player-tracking data. Percentiles are the NHL's: the share of the league below this player.