Photo by Ryan Tanner, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Quinton Byfield
Los Angeles Kings Right Wing #55
6-5, 230 pounds, and skates like a winger half his size — the question has always been what he does with it.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | LAK | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | +1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0.0 | 15:01 |
| 2021-22 | LAK | 40 | 5 | 5 | 10 | -7 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 39 | 12.8 | 12:09 |
| 2022-23 | LAK | 53 | 3 | 19 | 22 | +13 | 30 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 74 | 4.0 | 14:04 |
| 2023-24 | LAK | 80 | 20 | 35 | 55 | +19 | 42 | 6 | 0 | 4 | 161 | 12.4 | 16:29 |
| 2024-25 | LAK | 81 | 23 | 31 | 54 | +16 | 46 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 157 | 14.6 | 18:37 |
| 2025-26 | LAK | 79 | 24 | 25 | 49 | -2 | 46 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 180 | 13.3 | 20:01 |
| 2026-27 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 339 | 75 | 116 | 191 | +40 | 186 | 14 | 1 | 13 | 620 | 12.1 | 16:54 |
This Season So Far
The 2026-27 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
24 goals and 49 points in 79 games on 20 minutes a night. Steady progress rather than a leap, which is now the pattern: he has improved every year without ever having the season that settles the argument about him.
The Finesse Game
The skating is genuinely remarkable for the size. He gets to top speed in four or five strides and he can carry the puck through the neutral zone at that speed without losing it, which forces defencemen to back off and gives him the blue line for free. Very few players this big enter the zone with control this often.
The hands are good in close and the reach lets him protect pucks that smaller forwards would lose. What is still developing is the finishing: 180 shots produced 24 goals, and a lot of his chances come from having beaten everyone to a spot rather than from creating something with the puck on his stick.
He was drafted as a centre and has spent much of his career on the wing, which is either a development decision or an admission. He spent most of last season on the top line’s right side.
The Physical Game
230 pounds, and this is the part that still frustrates. He is not a punishing forechecker and he does not use his frame to take the ice he is entitled to. He absorbs contact well, protects the puck well, and initiates very little.
There is a version of this player who is impossible to defend, and it involves him deciding to be heavy.
The Intangibles
The second-overall pick in 2020, and the expectations attached to that have followed him through a slow start. He is 24 this season, which is around when big forwards usually arrive.
The tools are top-line tools and have been all along. Whether he becomes a first-line centre or settles as a very good complementary winger is probably decided in the next 2 years.
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
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.
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,180 minutes
- Expected goals
- 53%
- 77th pct
- Shot attempts
- 53.1%
- 82nd pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 46 for, 47 against. Expected: 52.5 and 46.6.
The eye and the numbers
SightedThe two rank him within 12 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.
Both bars are percentiles among the 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 80 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, 2025-26 · 79 games
- Top speed
- 23.2 mph
- 89th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 3.76 a game
- Distance
- 3.39 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.9 mph
- 77th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 83.6
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.
Recent form
Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first
7
points in his last 10 games — 6 goals, 1 assists, 28 shots
Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.
Usual linemates
2025-26 · 1180 minutes at five-on-five
- Kevin Fiala38%
- Trevor Moore35%
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, 2025-26
- The club
- LAK took 51.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.0% — 1.1 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First line, 1,180 minutes at five-on-five — 80th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alex Laferriere | 57.4% | 49.5% | 48.2% |
| Mikey Anderson | 52.2% | 53.5% | 50.4% |
| Kevin Fiala | 53.0% | 52.9% | 52.6% |
57.4% together, 49.5% for him apart and 48.2% for Laferriere apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
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
278 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 23 of them goals. His median goal came from 13 feet. 38% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.