Frank Vatrano

Last Season

Five goals and four assists in 50 games. Minus-15. Eleven and a half minutes a night, down from a regular top-nine role. Seventy-nine shots on goal produced five goals.

The Finesse Game

The shot was always the trade and it has stopped working. He is a one-timer and a quick-release winger who needs to be set up, and last season he was neither set up nor finishing when he was: 36 per cent of his unblocked attempts came from beyond forty feet, median 32. He was shooting from further out and less often.

He is 695 games and 186 goals into a career that began undrafted, so the ability was real. This was not it.

The Physical Game

Five foot eleven, 203, and he plays harder than that suggests — forty penalty minutes in 50 games. That part has not gone anywhere.

The Intangibles

The numbers here are the worst in this section and it is not close. He was on the ice for 40.5 per cent of the expected goals — second percentile in the entire league. The goals went 15-31 against. Five hundred and twenty minutes is a real sample, not a fluke of a few bad nights.

This report grades him as a fringe NHL shooter with a usable release. The arithmetic grades him as one of the worst players to draw regular minutes anywhere last season. That is a forty-point gap and the honest answer is that the numbers have the better of it right now.

He turns 33 in March. Three points in his last ten games. If the shot does not come back this is the end of it.