Liam Foudy

A first-round pick with 89 games in four years and a minus-27 on his ice.

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

2019-20	CBJ	2	0	1	1	+1	0	0	0	0	3	0.0	14:13
2020-21	CBJ	24	0	4	4	0	6	0	0	0	40	0.0	12:36
2021-22	CBJ	1	0	0	0	-1	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	11:51
2022-23	CBJ	62	7	7	14	-26	8	0	0	0	67	10.4	12:08
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	89	7	12	19	-26	14	0	0	0	111	6.3	12:18

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

7 goals and 7 assists in 62 games, minus-26, 12:08 a night — by a distance the most NHL hockey he has played.

41.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 7th percentile, and his ice went 19-46 — minus-27, the eighth-worst differential in the league. Against an expectation of 23.60-33.43, so the chances were bad and the goals were much worse.

Four seasons, 89 games, 19 points. He had 27 of those games before last year.

The Finesse Game

67 shots at a median of 20 feet, 51 per cent from inside twenty — he gets to the slot.

Inside forty: 61 shots, seven goals, 11.48 per cent. Beyond forty: 6 shots, none.

83.5 mph at the 7th percentile. The shot is very weak and the close-range volume is the only reason there are seven goals attached to it.

Seven goals and seven assists in 62 games is a fourth-line output and there is no evidence yet of anything more.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 186. 23.2 mph at the 91st percentile and 2.3 bursts over twenty a game at the 90th — genuinely fast, which is the reason he was a first-round pick and the reason he is still getting games.

1.89 miles a game at the 11th percentile. Short shifts.

8 penalty minutes in 62 games. He does not play a physical game at all, and for a bottom-six forward whose only measured asset is speed that is a difficult combination.

The Intangibles

18th overall in 2018, out of London, and four years later he is 23 with 89 games and no role.

The speed is real and measured. Everything that would turn it into an NHL career — the shot, the hands, the defensive reliability — is absent from the record so far, and the 7th-percentile possession share on the league’s worst club is the least encouraging way to spend a first full season.

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.

disciplined· stays out of the box
0.13 penalty minutes a game over 62, 9th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
edgesa strength· changes direction at speed; the forechecker commits and he is gone
“23.2 mph at the 91st percentile and 2.3 bursts over twenty a game at the 90th”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 683 minutes

Expected goals: 41.4%; 7th pct
Shot attempts: 44.5%; 14th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 19 for, 46 against. Expected: 23.6 and 33.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

3rd

Numbers

7th

The two rank him within 4 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 — 50 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 · 62 games

Top speed: 23.2 mph; 93rd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.26 a game
Distance: 1.89 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.5 mph; 29th 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

2022-23 · 683 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, 2022-23

The club: CBJ took 44.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 41.4% — 2.7 below the club he did it on.
The role: 683 minutes at five-on-five — 30th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Erik Gudbranson	35.5%	43.9%	41.6%
Andrew Peeke	40.5%	41.7%	44.2%
Sean Kuraly	38.4%	42.3%	42.5%

35.5% together, 43.9% for him apart and 41.6% for Gudbranson 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

98 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 7 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 51% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 12% from beyond forty.