Carter Verhaeghe

Last Season

Twenty-five goals and 30 assists in 77 games — 55 points, minus-14, at 17:37 a night with six power-play goals.

The Finesse Game

The speed is the engine and it always has been. He beats defencemen wide from the neutral zone and the release comes off the rush, which is why the shot chart looks the way it does: median 30 feet, only 34 per cent from inside twenty.

That is a long way out for a 25-goal scorer, and it works because the shots come with a defenceman turning rather than set. Twenty-five goals from 274 attempts is a good conversion from awkward ice.

The Physical Game

Six foot two and 183 pounds, which is light, and he plays accordingly. Thirty-two penalty minutes. He is not going to the net front and does not win pucks along the wall; the entire game depends on getting to open ice first.

The Intangibles

Fifty-one point two per cent of the expected goals, 65th percentile, and 54.4 per cent of the shot attempts, 88th — a genuinely good possession season attached to a minus-14, which is the club’s whole problem in one line.

Six points in his last ten, five of them goals.

He is 31, an eighty-second overall pick who did not play a full NHL season until he was 24, and he has 172 goals and two Stanley Cups. On the playoff question his page is honest: a game built on speed into open ice is the one a checking series takes away first.