This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Sam Lafferty

Thirteen goals on seventy-eight shots, and five career shorthanded goals from a fourth line.

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	VAN	79	13	11	24	+4	32	0	1	3	78	16.7	11:53
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	289	36	47	83	-24	154	0	5	6	349	10.3	12:14

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

13 goals and 11 assists in 79 games for Vancouver — 24 points at 11:53 a night, plus-4, with 1 shorthanded goal and 3 game-winners on 78 shots, converting at 16.67 per cent, and 32 penalty minutes. A career high in goals.

45.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 869 minutes, the 25th percentile. His ice went 31-34 against an expectation of 28.31-33.66 — ten goals scored above expectation on a fourth line, which is not going to repeat.

The Finesse Game

78 attempts at a median of 18 feet, with 53 per cent from inside 20 and 13 per cent from beyond 40, converting at 16.67 per cent against a career 10.32.

He goes to the net and shoots from the paint, and thirteen goals in under twelve minutes a night is a very good rate for the ice he is given. The conversion is shot selection plus a good year.

11 assists. He does not create and the puck does not stay on his stick.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 205. He forechecks first and closes on a defenceman quickly — the skating is the top end of a fourth line and it is why he kills penalties.

32 penalty minutes in 79 games and 154 in 289 for his career is a moderate rate. He does not agitate and he does not retaliate.

The Intangibles

A hundred and thirteenth overall in 2014 by Pittsburgh, four years at Brown, and 289 NHL games and 83 points at 29 across five clubs.

Five career shorthanded goals in 289 games from a fourth-line forward is the trait that keeps him employed, and it is exactly what a club with a 25th-ranked penalty kill should be buying.

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
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.

durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“**He goes to the net and shoots from the paint**, and thirteen goals in under twelve minutes a night is a very good rate for the ice he is given.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“**Five career shorthanded goals in 289 games from a fourth-line forward is the trait that keeps him employed**, and it is exactly what a club with a 25th-ranked penalty kill should be buying.”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“**He forechecks first and closes on a defenceman quickly** — the skating is the top end of a fourth line and it is why he kills penalties.”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“11 assists. **He does not create and the puck does not stay on his stick.**”
agitatorhe lacks it· gets under the skin; draws the retaliation
“He does not agitate and he does not retaliate.”
retaliateshe lacks it· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty
“He does not agitate and he does not retaliate.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 869 minutes

Expected goals: 45.7%; 25th pct
Shot attempts: 48.5%; 41st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 31 for, 34 against. Expected: 28.3 and 33.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

31st

Numbers

25th

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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 65 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 · 79 games

Top speed: 23.4 mph; 94th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.81 a game
Distance: 2.01 miles a game
Hardest shot: 89.0 mph; 64th 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

2023-24 with VAN · 869 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: VAN took 52.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 45.7% — 6.9 below the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 869 minutes at five-on-five — 46th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nils Hoglander	46.3%	45.4%	58.2%
Ian Cole	46.7%	45.1%	56.2%
Quinn Hughes	49.4%	43.7%	56.1%

46.3% together, 45.4% for him apart and 58.2% for Hoglander apart. Hoglander was better away from him while his own share held, which is a mark against him more 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

112 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 13 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 53% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 13% from beyond forty.