Armchair Hockey Scout Beta

This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

19

Peyton Krebs

Buffalo Sabres Center

Twenty-six points on the hardest fourth-line assignment, from the other half of the Eichel trade.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2020-21VGK4011+1000010.011:26
2021-22VGK/BUF5771522-26220025612.514:35
2022-23BUF7491726-8501107811.513:50
2023-24 so far
Career135163349-337211213511.814:05

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

9 goals and 17 assists in 74 games — 26 points at 13:50 a night, minus-8, with a shorthanded goal on 78 shots, converting at 11.54 per cent, and 50 penalty minutes.

46.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 903 minutes, the 30th percentile. His ice went 30-35 against an expectation of 30.39-34.66, which is almost exactly the chances — there is nothing here to explain away in either direction.

The Finesse Game

78 attempts at a median of 22 feet with 45 per cent from inside 20, converting at 11.54 per cent off an 88.0 mph shot at the 30th percentile.

49 points in 135 career games. The junior record was much better than this and the projection was a top-six centre, and three seasons in he is a checking-line forward who kills penalties. That is a useful player and it is not what he was traded as.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 188 and he competes above the weight — 72 penalty minutes in 135 games, and he goes into corners he will lose.

The skating is decent at 22.1 mph, the 40th percentile, with 1.3 bursts a game at the 67th. He works and he is not fast, and on a club this quick that combination puts him on the fourth line rather than the first.

The Intangibles

Seventeenth overall in 2019 to Vegas, and he arrived with Tuch in the Jack Eichel trade — the piece Buffalo was said to value most.

He is 22. Tuch has become a first-line winger and Krebs has become a fourth-line centre, and both of those were decided within eighteen months of the trade — which is a useful reminder of how quickly a prospect’s ceiling gets settled once the games start.

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.

  • 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.

  • penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short

    “three seasons in he is a checking-line forward who kills penalties”

  • wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line

    “he competes above the weight — 72 penalty minutes in 135 games, and he goes into corners he will lose”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 903 minutes

Expected goals
46.7%
30th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
52.5%
75th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 30 for, 35 against. Expected: 30.4 and 34.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
55th
Numbers
30th

The report ranks him 25 points above where the numbers do. 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 120 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 64 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 903 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
BUF took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.7% — 3.1 below the club he did it on.
The role
Third line, 903 minutes at five-on-five — 49th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Zemgus Girgensons48.2%44.9%50.4%
Kyle Okposo47.5%45.8%51.7%
Owen Power48.0%45.9%49.6%

48.2% together, 44.9% for him apart and 50.4% for Girgensons apart. He was worse away from Girgensons, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Girgensons did.

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

107 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.