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

Sam Lafferty

Three bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, and the eighth percentile of zone starts.

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

2019-20	PIT	50	6	7	13	+5	23	0	0	1	56	10.7	9:37
2020-21	PIT	34	0	6	6	-6	25	0	0	0	33	0.0	9:47
2021-22	PIT/CHI	56	5	8	13	-16	37	0	0	1	80	6.3	13:35
2022-23	CHI/TOR	70	12	15	27	-11	37	0	4	1	102	11.8	14:37
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	210	23	36	59	-28	122	0	4	3	271	8.5	12:22

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

12 goals and 15 assists in 70 games — 27 points — at 14:37 a night between Chicago and Toronto. Minus-11, 102 shots at 11.8 per cent, four shorthanded, 37 penalty minutes.

12 goals and 27 points are both career highs, in his fourth season, and the four shorthanded goals are all four he has scored.

42.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 7th percentile, across 857 minutes, with his ice at 26-41 against an expectation of 28.17-37.65.

He started 36.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 8th percentile: 160 attacking draws against 277 defensive ones. That is genuinely severe deployment, taken between a Chicago club that finished thirty-first in chance share and a Toronto club that finished fourth, and it explains a good deal of the 7th percentile without excusing all of it.

The Finesse Game

102 shots at a median of 25 feet, with 37 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 31 shots on goal and six goals — 19.35 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 37 shots and six goals, 16.22 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 24 shots and no goals.

Above the rate from both bands that carry his volume, on sixty-eight shots on goal, against a career 8.5 per cent across 210 games. The 11.8 per cent last season is the outlier and the career figure is what to expect.

135 tracked attempts, 83 of them wrist shots, 19 backhands and four slap. 87.3 mph at the 24th percentile — a soft shot.

The scoring is not the file and never was. Four shorthanded goals from a fourth-line centre come from beating a defenceman to a loose puck, which is a description of his skating rather than his hands.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 205 pounds, with 37 penalty minutes in 70 games and 122 in 210 career games.

3.0 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 97th percentile — at a top speed of 23.0 mph, the 86th. He covers 2.43 miles a game, the 39th, which is fourteen minutes of ice time rather than a lack of work.

That burst count is the file. Almost nobody in this book who plays fourteen minutes a night reaches twenty miles an hour three times a game, and on a fourth line taking defensive-zone starts it is exactly the right tool.

He forechecks at full speed and arrives before the retrieval is made, which is where both the shorthanded goals and a good share of the 37 penalty minutes come from.

He is not a punishing forward at 205 pounds and does not try to be; the pressure is applied with feet, not shoulders.

The Intangibles

A hundred and thirteenth overall in 2014, the fourth round, four seasons, 210 games, 59 points across Pittsburgh, Chicago and Toronto.

23 goals and 36 assists, and a minus-28.

He is twenty-eight, joining his fourth club, for a fourth-line and penalty-killing job.

What the file describes is one of the fastest fourth-liners in the league attached to a soft shot and a chance share that has never been good. The speed is real and measured. Everything built on top of it is a coaching decision.

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
he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He forechecks at full speed and arrives before the retrieval is made, which is where both the shorthanded goals and a good share of the 37 penalty minutes come from.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“Four shorthanded goals from a fourth-line centre come from beating a defenceman to a loose puck, which is a description of his skating rather than his hands.”
punishinghe lacks it· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He is not a punishing forward at 205 pounds and does not try to be; the pressure is applied with feet, not shoulders.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 857 minutes

Expected goals: 42.8%; 11th pct
Shot attempts: 45.1%; 18th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 26 for, 41 against. Expected: 28.2 and 37.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

62nd

Numbers

11th

The report ranks him 51 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 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 68 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 · 70 games

Top speed: 23.0 mph; 89th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 3.00 a game
Distance: 2.43 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.3 mph; 50th 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

2022-23 with CHI · 638 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: TOR took 54.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 42.8% — 11.7 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 857 minutes at five-on-five — 45th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jason Dickinson	43.1%	42.6%	44.6%
Jake McCabe	48.4%	40.4%	49.2%
Andreas Athanasiou	46.7%	41.2%	41.8%

43.1% together, 42.6% for him apart and 44.6% for Dickinson apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.

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

124 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 12 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 37% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.