This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Blake Lizotte
Los Angeles Kings Center
Five foot nine, seventy penalty minutes, and the fourth percentile for registered shot speed.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | LAK | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 11:12 |
| 2019-20 | LAK | 65 | 6 | 17 | 23 | -4 | 20 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 87 | 6.9 | 13:58 |
| 2020-21 | LAK | 41 | 3 | 7 | 10 | +2 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 42 | 7.1 | 12:42 |
| 2021-22 | LAK | 70 | 10 | 14 | 24 | +15 | 28 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 91 | 11.0 | 12:10 |
| 2022-23 | LAK | 81 | 11 | 23 | 34 | +11 | 70 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 108 | 10.2 | 12:57 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 258 | 30 | 61 | 91 | +23 | 134 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 329 | 9.1 | 12:57 |
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
11 goals and 23 assists in 81 games — 34 points — with 70 penalty minutes. Plus-11, 12:57 a night, 108 shots at 10.2 per cent.
Thirty-four points is a career high, and so are the penalty minutes.
53.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 79th percentile, with his ice at 43-39 against an expectation of 39.99-34.45.
Five seasons, 258 games, 91 points, all of them in Los Angeles.
The Finesse Game
108 shots at a median of 22 feet, 45 per cent from inside twenty and 17 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 22 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 86 shots, 11 goals, 12.79 per cent.
24 tip-ins out of 152 tracked attempts, from a 5-9 centre. He goes to the net front and stays there, which is the least likely thing about him.
82.0 mph at the 4th percentile — the softest registered shot on the Los Angeles roster. He took four slap shots all season, so the measurement is largely recording that fact rather than his hands; the 10.2 per cent conversion says the finishing is fine within his range.
The Physical Game
5-9 and 176, and 70 penalty minutes in 81 games — the most of any forward who played for Los Angeles last season, and more than double his previous career high.
Top speed 22.6 mph, the 65th percentile; bursts 1.3 a game, the 66th; 2.05 miles a game, the 19th.
At 176 pounds he plays the game of a man forty pounds heavier and takes the penalties that come with it. He finishes checks, he goes into the corners first, and he answers for it afterwards.
The honest reading of the penalty total on a player this size is that some of it is competitiveness and some of it is being late, and the tracking does not separate the two.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, out of St. Cloud State, signed by Los Angeles at twenty-one, and five seasons of a third-line job since.
58.3 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 85th percentile.
He kills penalties and takes the draws behind Kopitar and Danault, on a club that concedes fewer expected goals per sixty than any club but one. That is a real place in a real structure.
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
81 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“**Undrafted**, out of St. Cloud State, signed by Los Angeles at twenty-one, and five seasons of a third-line job since.”
“He goes to the net front and stays there, which is the least likely thing about him.”
“He finishes checks, he goes into the corners first, and he answers for it afterwards.”
“He kills penalties and takes the draws behind Kopitar and Danault, on a club that concedes fewer expected goals per sixty than any club but one.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 929 minutes
- Expected goals
- 53.7%
- 79th pct
- Shot attempts
- 54.4%
- 87th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 43 for, 39 against. Expected: 40.0 and 34.5.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 13 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 69 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, 2022-23 · 81 games
- Top speed
- 22.6 mph
- 71st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.28 a game
- Distance
- 2.05 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 82.0 mph
- 24th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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
2022-23 · 929 minutes at five-on-five
- Kevin Fiala28%
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
- LAK took 53.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.7% — 0.2 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 929 minutes at five-on-five — 50th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sean Walker | 51.3% | 55.1% | 52.0% |
| Gabriel Vilardi | 52.6% | 54.3% | 58.9% |
| Matt Roy | 53.3% | 53.9% | 55.4% |
51.3% together, 55.1% for him apart and 52.0% for Walker apart. He was better away from Walker, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Walker.
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
151 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 11 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.