This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Sam Carrick

58 penalty minutes on a fourth line, the 10th percentile in chance share, and an on-ice record twenty goals better than it.

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

2014-15	TOR	16	1	1	2	+1	9	0	0	0	17	5.9	6:29
2015-16	TOR	3	0	0	0	-2	4	0	0	0	4	0.0	11:28
2018-19	ANA	6	0	1	1	-1	2	0	0	0	5	0.0	10:13
2019-20	ANA	9	1	1	2	-3	0	0	1	0	16	6.3	13:46
2020-21	ANA	13	2	4	6	+4	28	0	0	0	23	8.7	12:55
2021-22	ANA	64	11	8	19	-12	85	0	0	0	80	13.8	11:28
2022-23	ANA	52	3	4	7	-17	86	0	0	0	50	6.0	10:34
2023-24	ANA/EDM	77	10	6	16	-11	102	1	2	0	92	10.9	12:14
2024-25	NYR	80	6	14	20	+5	58	0	1	2	84	7.1	11:56
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	320	34	39	73	-36	374	1	4	2	371	9.2	11:28

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

6 goals and 14 assists in 80 games — 20 points, plus-5, at 11:56 a night with 58 penalty minutes.

44.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 10th percentile, across 833 minutes. The on-ice goals were 24-25 against an expectation of 28.06-34.70, which is twenty goals of surplus at one end and is the least repeatable number in this chapter.

The Finesse Game

There is not much and it is not the job. 84 attempts with 45 per cent of them from inside 20 feet at a median of 23 feet is a fourth-line centre going to the net, and 6 goals at 7.1 per cent is what that returns.

73 points in 320 career games is the rate. He wins a draw, he chips it out, and the puck does not stay on his stick long enough for anything else to happen.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 202 and he plays every shift like it is his last one. He forechecks hard, he finishes checks, and he will fight — 374 penalty minutes in 320 games is a genuine fourth-line total in a league that mostly stopped producing them.

He is also the man who answers for a teammate, which is a real job on a roster this small at the top of the lineup.

The Intangibles

A fifth-round pick who played 47 NHL games in his first eight seasons as a professional and has now played 320.

He is 33, he takes defensive-zone draws, he kills penalties, and he costs nothing. The 10th-percentile chance share is what a fourth line starting in its own end produces, and the club would be worse without him even so.

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.

durable· was available
80 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best
22% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 2nd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks hard, he finishes checks, and he will fight — 374 penalty minutes in 320 games is a genuine fourth-line total in a league that mostly stopped producing them.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He forechecks hard, he finishes checks, and he will fight”
retaliatesa strength· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty
“He is also the man who answers for a teammate, which is a real job on a roster this small at the top of the lineup.”
faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“He is 33, he takes defensive-zone draws, he kills penalties, and he costs nothing.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He is 33, he takes defensive-zone draws, he kills penalties, and he costs nothing.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 833 minutes

Expected goals: 44.7%; 15th pct
Shot attempts: 44.8%; 12th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 24 for, 25 against. Expected: 28.1 and 34.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

9th

Numbers

15th

The two rank him within 6 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 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 63 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, 2024-25 · 80 games

Top speed: 21.6 mph; 21st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.49 a game
Distance: 2.00 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.0 mph; 88th 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

2024-25 · 833 minutes at five-on-five

Adam Edstrom46%
Jimmy Veseyoff the roster32%
Matt Rempe22%

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, 2024-25

The club: NYR took 47.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 44.7% — 3.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 833 minutes at five-on-five — 39th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Adam Edstrom	46.4%	43.3%	39.0%
Braden Schneider	45.4%	44.3%	46.6%
Jimmy Vesey	47.3%	43.6%	40.3%

46.4% together, 43.3% for him apart and 39.0% for Edstrom 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

112 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 45% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 28% from beyond forty.