This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Sam Bennett
Florida Panthers Center
Six Calgary seasons that never reached forty points, and then two Florida seasons that both did.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | CGY | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 16:00 |
| 2015-16 | CGY | 77 | 18 | 18 | 36 | -11 | 37 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 136 | 13.2 | 15:09 |
| 2016-17 | CGY | 81 | 13 | 13 | 26 | -16 | 75 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 122 | 10.7 | 14:59 |
| 2017-18 | CGY | 82 | 11 | 15 | 26 | -18 | 59 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 157 | 7.0 | 14:24 |
| 2018-19 | CGY | 71 | 13 | 14 | 27 | -6 | 93 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 115 | 11.3 | 13:17 |
| 2019-20 | CGY | 52 | 8 | 4 | 12 | -1 | 36 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 82 | 9.8 | 12:31 |
| 2020-21 | CGY/FLA | 48 | 10 | 17 | 27 | -2 | 52 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 106 | 9.4 | 14:25 |
| 2021-22 | FLA | 71 | 28 | 21 | 49 | +27 | 74 | 5 | 0 | 7 | 241 | 11.6 | 16:57 |
| 2022-23 | FLA | 63 | 16 | 24 | 40 | +5 | 54 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 193 | 8.3 | 17:24 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 546 | 117 | 127 | 244 | -23 | 480 | 22 | 0 | 19 | 1153 | 10.2 | 14:57 |
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
16 goals and 24 assists in 63 games — 40 points. Plus-5, 17:24 a night, 193 shots at 8.3 per cent, 54 penalty minutes.
56.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 93rd percentile, with his ice at 44-35 against an expectation of 48.71-36.92.
The career shape is the point. Fourth overall in 2014, six Calgary seasons with a best of 36 points and a run of minus figures — minus-11, minus-16, minus-18, minus-6. Then 49 points in 71 games in his first full Florida year and 40 in 63 in his second.
Nine seasons, 546 games, 244 points.
The Finesse Game
193 shots at a median of 24 feet, 42 per cent from inside twenty and 16 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 25 shots, 1 goal. Inside forty: 155 shots, 15 goals, 9.68 per cent — a low conversion rate for that distribution, and the reason 193 shots produced only sixteen goals.
14 tip-ins and 11 slap shots in the mix. He gets to the net and he does not always finish once he is there; this is a season in which the volume was there and the touch was not.
89.4 mph at the 41st percentile.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 193, 54 penalty minutes in 63 games, and a career total of 480 in 546.
Top speed 22.2 mph, the 43rd percentile; bursts 1.4 a game, the 71st; 3.02 miles a game, the 80th.
He forechecks hard and finishes his checks, and the penalty rate has been consistent across nine seasons and three roles. The 93 penalty minutes he took in Calgary in 2018-19 came in seventy-one games at thirteen minutes a night, which is a rate very few players sustain.
The Intangibles
He has now missed at least eleven games in six of his nine seasons, and 63 games was his most recent.
What Florida found that Calgary did not is not visible in the tracking, which reads the same in both places. The difference is deployment: he plays the second line here and played the fourth there, and the chance share follows the assignment.
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.
“He forechecks hard and finishes his checks, and the penalty rate has been consistent across nine seasons and three roles.”
“He gets to the net and he does not always finish once he is there; this is a season in which the volume was there and the touch was not.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 863 minutes
- Expected goals
- 56.9%
- 93rd pct
- Shot attempts
- 55.7%
- 92nd 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: 44 for, 35 against. Expected: 48.7 and 36.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 7 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 — 75 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 · 63 games
- Top speed
- 22.2 mph
- 50th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.43 a game
- Distance
- 3.02 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.4 mph
- 64th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 · 863 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
- FLA took 53.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.9% — 3.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First line, 863 minutes at five-on-five — 45th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Tkachuk | 60.9% | 49.1% | 60.2% |
| Carter Verhaeghe | 58.5% | 55.4% | 53.9% |
| Brandon Montour | 57.5% | 56.5% | 50.6% |
60.9% together, 49.1% for him apart and 60.2% for Tkachuk apart. He was worse away from Tkachuk, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Tkachuk 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
238 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 16 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 42% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.