This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Carter Verhaeghe

A third-round pick who did not play a full season until he was 24 and has 127 goals in 330 games since.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2019-20	TBL	52	9	4	13	-9	8	1	0	1	57	15.8	9:22
2020-21	FLA	43	18	18	36	+24	31	1	1	3	107	16.8	17:44
2021-22	FLA	78	24	31	55	+24	48	0	0	4	167	14.4	16:03
2022-23	FLA	81	42	31	73	+10	46	7	0	2	275	15.3	17:30
2023-24	FLA	76	34	38	72	+17	36	8	0	7	246	13.8	17:58
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	330	127	122	249	+66	169	17	1	17	852	14.9	16:01

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

76 games, 34 goals and 38 assists for 72 points, 8 on the power play, 7 game-winners, 36 penalty minutes, 17:58 a night and plus-17. He took 56.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,062 minutes, the 93rd percentile, and his ice went 58-40 against an expectation of 55.63-43.06.

Two goals above expectation at one end and three fewer conceded at the other. Seven game-winners on a club that won a Cup, which is the reputation he has and the numbers support it more than reputations usually do.

The Finesse Game

246 shots at a median of 29 feet with 34 per cent from inside 20, converted at 13.8 per cent against a career 14.9 across 330 games.

He is the fastest forward on the club and the shot comes off in stride, which is the combination that makes a 29-foot median dangerous rather than wasteful. 122 career assists in 330 games says the passing is adequate and the shooting is the point.

The Physical Game

He is 6-2 and 183 and is moved off pucks by anybody who commits to it.

36 penalty minutes in 76 games is a low rate and there is nothing in his game that generates them. He does not forecheck hard and he does not win the wall.

The Intangibles

A third-round pick in 2013 out of Toronto, five seasons, and 249 points in 330 games. He was 24 before he played fifty National Hockey League games and he has two Stanley Cup rings.

At 29 the speed is the whole asset and speed is the thing that goes. There are four or five years of this left and the club is paying for all of them.

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.

he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He is 6-2 and 183 and is moved off pucks by anybody who commits to it.”
forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck
“He does not forecheck hard and he does not win the wall.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He does not forecheck hard and he does not win the wall.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 1,062 minutes

Expected goals: 56.4%; 93rd pct
Shot attempts: 57.6%; 96th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 58 for, 40 against. Expected: 55.6 and 43.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

47th

Numbers

93rd

The numbers rank him 46 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 652 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, 2023-24 · 76 games

Top speed: 23.2 mph; 93rd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.47 a game
Distance: 2.87 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.3 mph; 86th pct

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

2023-24 · 1062 minutes at five-on-five

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, 2023-24

The club: FLA took 53.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.4% — 2.7 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,062 minutes at five-on-five — 67th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Matthew Tkachuk	55.8%	57.6%	53.5%
Sam Bennett	58.5%	53.8%	51.4%
Gustav Forsling	60.6%	53.7%	53.9%

55.8% together, 57.6% for him apart and 53.5% for Tkachuk apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

335 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 33 of them goals. His median goal came from 22 feet. 34% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 24% from beyond forty.