Armchair Hockey Scout Beta

This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

15

Alexander Kerfoot

Arizona Coyotes Center

The 94th percentile in sprints over twenty miles an hour and the 9th in shot velocity.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2017-18COL79192443-7285008123.513:27
2018-19COL78152742-93840111612.914:53
2019-20TOR6591928-2321018810.214:46
2020-21TOR5681523+2120116811.814:27
2021-22TOR82133851+192000111711.115:13
2022-23TOR82102232+8302111337.514:37
2023-24 so far
Career44274145219+11160122560312.314:34

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

10 goals and 22 assists in 82 games for Toronto — 32 points at 14:37 a night, plus-8, with a shorthanded goal on 133 shots and 30 penalty minutes.

54.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 998 minutes, the 84th percentile — the second-best number anybody brought to this roster. His ice went 42-35 against an expectation of 41.54-34.61, which is almost exactly what the chances predicted, so the result was earned rather than lucky.

Six seasons, 442 games, and he has never missed more than a handful.

The Finesse Game

133 attempts at a median of 19 feet with 51 per cent from inside 20, off a shot measured at 83.9 mph, the 9th percentile in the league.

Ten goals on 133 shots is a 7.5 per cent conversion and it is the honest rate — 74 goals in 442 games. He gets to the right places and cannot finish from them, which is the difference between a 30-point third-line centre and a 50-point second-line one.

145 career assists says the passing is the better half, and he is a competent power-play option without ever being the reason one works.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 185, and he plays a clean game — 160 penalty minutes in 442.

The tracking describes the role precisely: 2.6 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game, the 94th percentile, on 2.39 miles a game, the 36th. Short shifts at full speed. He is a forechecker and a penalty killer who sprints, stops, and goes off, and 23.0 mph top end at the 85th percentile says the speed is real.

The Intangibles

A hundred and fiftieth overall in 2012, out of Harvard, and he signed as a free agent rather than with the club that drafted him — 442 NHL games from a fifth-round pick who chose his own employer.

He is 29. He is exactly the player a rebuilding club signs for one season and sells in March: cheap, versatile, defensively trusted, and of no use whatever to Arizona’s next good team.

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
  • 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.

  • durable· was available

    82 of 82 games

    Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

  • penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short

    “He is a forechecker and a penalty killer who sprints, stops, and goes off”

  • forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck

    “He is a forechecker and a penalty killer who sprints, stops, and goes off”

  • defensively-responsiblea strength· comes back; can be trusted with a lead

    “cheap, versatile, defensively trusted, and of no use whatever to Arizona's next good team”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 998 minutes

Expected goals
54.5%
84th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
52.5%
75th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 42 for, 35 against. Expected: 41.5 and 34.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
54th
Numbers
84th

The numbers rank him 30 points above where the report does. 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. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

Both bars are percentiles among the 58 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 62 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 with TOR · 998 minutes at five-on-five

  • David Kampf27%
  • Pierre Engvallnow NYI24%
  • Calle Jarnkrok19%

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, 2022-23

The club
TOR took 54.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 54.5% — level with the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 998 minutes at five-on-five — 58th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Justin Holl50.1%56.9%54.1%
Mark Giordano55.1%54.3%57.5%
David Kampf48.9%56.7%49.4%

50.1% together, 56.9% for him apart and 54.1% for Holl apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

173 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.