This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Sam Bennett
Florida Panthers Center
One hundred penalty minutes in 69 games and 580 in his career, and the most disliked forward on a club that has two.
| 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 | FLA | 69 | 20 | 21 | 41 | +17 | 100 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 171 | 11.7 | 16:37 |
| 2024-25 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 615 | 137 | 148 | 285 | -6 | 580 | 27 | 0 | 21 | 1324 | 10.3 | 15:08 |
This Season So Far
The 2024-25 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
69 games, 20 goals and 21 assists for 41 points, 5 on the power play, 100 penalty minutes, 16:37 a night and plus-17. He took 55.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 936 minutes, the 91st percentile, and his ice went 45-28 against an expectation of 47.90-37.85.
Ten goals fewer conceded than the chances called for. Twenty goals from a second-line centre who plays sixteen minutes and takes a hundred penalty minutes is a genuinely useful season.
The Finesse Game
171 shots at a median of 26 feet with 40 per cent from inside 20, converted at 11.7 per cent against a career 10.4.
148 career assists in 615 games. The hands are ordinary and the release is quick, and the goals come from arriving at the net rather than from beating a goaltender cleanly. He goes to the front of the net and stays there.
The Physical Game
He finishes every check and hits to hurt, and 580 career penalty minutes in 615 games is what that costs.
He is 6-1 and 193 and forechecks harder than anybody on the roster. He takes liberties, retaliates when he is hit first, and is the reason the opposition’s best defenceman has a longer night than the shift chart suggests.
The Intangibles
Fourth overall in 2014 out of Holland Landing, ten seasons, and 285 points in 615 games. He was a disappointment in Calgary for the better part of seven years and has been exactly what this club wanted for four.
He is 28 and the value is in April rather than November. That is not a thing this book can measure and it is also not a thing anybody who has watched a playoff series would dispute.
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 is 6-1 and 193 and forechecks harder than anybody on the roster.”
“He finishes every check and hits to hurt, and 580 career penalty minutes in 615 games is what that costs.”
“He finishes every check and hits to hurt, and 580 career penalty minutes in 615 games is what that costs.”
“He takes liberties, retaliates when he is hit first, and is the reason the opposition's best defenceman has a longer night than the shift chart suggests.”
“He takes liberties, retaliates when he is hit first, and is the reason the opposition's best defenceman has a longer night than the shift chart suggests.”
“He goes to the front of the net and stays there.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 936 minutes
- Expected goals
- 55.9%
- 91st pct
- Shot attempts
- 57.6%
- 96th 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: 45 for, 28 against. Expected: 47.9 and 37.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 19 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 74 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, 2023-24 · 69 games
- Top speed
- 22.5 mph
- 66th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.45 a game
- Distance
- 2.87 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.3 mph
- 66th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.1
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.5
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
2023-24 · 936 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, 2023-24
- The club
- FLA took 53.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.9% — 2.2 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second line, 936 minutes at five-on-five — 51st percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Tkachuk | 56.1% | 54.8% | 52.3% |
| Carter Verhaeghe | 58.5% | 51.4% | 53.8% |
| Brandon Montour | 55.8% | 55.9% | 51.9% |
56.1% together, 54.8% for him apart and 52.3% for Tkachuk apart. Tkachuk was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Tkachuk than for him.
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
244 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 20 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 40% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.