This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Sam Steel
Dallas Stars Center
Fifty-one goals for and thirty-two against on his ice, against an expectation of 34 and 29 — the best result on the club and none of it repeatable.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | ANA | 22 | 6 | 5 | 11 | +2 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 33 | 18.2 | 14:58 |
| 2019-20 | ANA | 65 | 6 | 16 | 22 | -13 | 20 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 85 | 7.1 | 15:33 |
| 2020-21 | ANA | 42 | 6 | 6 | 12 | -7 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 42 | 14.3 | 14:32 |
| 2021-22 | ANA | 68 | 6 | 14 | 20 | -17 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 66 | 9.1 | 12:19 |
| 2022-23 | MIN | 65 | 10 | 18 | 28 | +11 | 18 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 85 | 11.8 | 14:58 |
| 2023-24 | DAL | 77 | 9 | 15 | 24 | 0 | 29 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 86 | 10.5 | 13:15 |
| 2024-25 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 339 | 43 | 74 | 117 | -24 | 99 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 397 | 10.8 | 14:06 |
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
Seventy-seven games, 9 goals and 15 assists with 2 shorthanded, 13:15 a night and exactly even. He converted 10.47 per cent of 86 shots.
He took 50.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 876 minutes, the 56th percentile, and his ice went 29-34 against an expectation of 30.93-30.41. Seventeen goals of scoring above expectation on a fourth-line centre is the largest gap on the roster and it is not a thing he did.
The Finesse Game
Eighty-six shots at a median of 27 feet with 39 per cent from inside 20, and 9 went in. Forty-three goals in 339 career games at 10.83 per cent is the level.
Seventy-four career assists. The puck moves quickly and simply, and the offensive game that made him a first-round pick never arrived.
The Physical Game
He is 6-0 and 185 and does not play a physical game. Twenty-nine penalty minutes in 77 games is a moderate rate.
He kills penalties and has 4 career shorthanded goals, and he wins his share of defensive-zone draws. That is the job and he does it without incident.
The Intangibles
The 30th pick in 2016 out of Ardrossan, six seasons and 339 games across Anaheim, Minnesota and Dallas, and a career minus-24.
He is 26 and the fourth-line centre on a club that finished second in the league. The chance share says he is better than that role and the six seasons behind him say he is not.
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.
- perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
30.1% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 90th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
“He kills penalties and has 4 career shorthanded goals, and he wins his share of defensive-zone draws.”
“That is the job and he does it without incident.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 876 minutes
- Expected goals
- 50.4%
- 56th pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.4%
- 75th 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: 29 for, 34 against. Expected: 30.9 and 30.4.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 45 points above where the report does. 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 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 58 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 · 77 games
- Top speed
- 22.3 mph
- 54th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.48 a game
- Distance
- 2.21 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.0 mph
- 52nd 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 · 876 minutes at five-on-five
- Joe Pavelskioff the roster16%
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
- DAL took 54.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.4% — 4.2 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 876 minutes at five-on-five — 47th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Craig Smith | 54.7% | 45.4% | 57.6% |
| Radek Faksa | 49.4% | 51.5% | 51.8% |
| Esa Lindell | 50.3% | 50.5% | 56.8% |
54.7% together, 45.4% for him apart and 57.6% for Smith apart. He was worse away from Smith, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Smith 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
123 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 8 of them goals. His median goal came from 23 feet. 39% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 30% from beyond forty.