Sammy Blais
St. Louis Blues Left Wing
The slowest measured top speed of any forward in this chapter, and a fifteen-goal swing in his favour.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | STL | 11 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +1 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 11.1 | 10:46 |
| 2018-19 | STL | 32 | 2 | 2 | 4 | -1 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 27 | 7.4 | 9:51 |
| 2019-20 | STL | 40 | 6 | 7 | 13 | -2 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 56 | 10.7 | 12:35 |
| 2020-21 | STL | 36 | 8 | 7 | 15 | 0 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 31 | 25.8 | 12:04 |
| 2021-22 | NYR | 14 | 0 | 4 | 4 | +3 | 17 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 17 | 0.0 | 13:28 |
| 2022-23 | NYR/STL | 71 | 9 | 16 | 25 | +4 | 30 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 70 | 12.9 | 11:48 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 204 | 26 | 38 | 64 | +5 | 91 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 210 | 12.4 | 11:45 |
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
9 goals and 16 assists in 71 games — 25 points — at 11:48 a night between the Rangers and St. Louis. Plus-4, 70 shots at 12.9 per cent, 30 penalty minutes, no power-play points.
25 points is a career high by ten.
43.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 9th percentile, across 781 minutes, with his ice at 33-25 against an expectation of 23.79-30.77 — nine goals better than the chances at the good end and six better at the other.
That is a fifteen-goal swing in his favour on 781 minutes, and it is the third such case in this chapter. St. Louis finished second in the league in finishing and the bottom six is where it shows.
He started 53 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 63rd percentile.
The Finesse Game
70 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 61 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 6 per cent from beyond forty.
Inside twenty feet: 43 shots on goal and seven goals — 16.28 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 19 shots and two goals, 10.53 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: six shots and none.
On the league rate from both places he shoots from, which for a fourth-line winger is a perfectly good result. A 12.9 per cent shooting percentage against a career 12.4 across 210 shots.
102 tracked attempts, five of them slap shots and 14 backhands. 87.9 mph at the 29th percentile.
Twenty-six goals in 204 career games. The offence is a by-product; the puck arrives at the net because he has carried it there through people.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 206 pounds, and a top speed of 20.6 mph — the 1st percentile of the league — with 0.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 3rd. He covers 1.91 miles a game at the 11th on twelve minutes a night.
That is the slowest tracking line of any forward in this chapter and one of the slowest in the book. Almost nobody in the league is slower at full stretch.
30 penalty minutes in 71 games and 91 in 204 career games. He is nasty and plays a heavy game below the goal line, which is the only way a forward that slow holds an NHL job.
He wins the wall by leaning on people rather than by getting there first, and at 206 pounds it works often enough to keep him in the lineup.
The Intangibles
A hundred and seventy-sixth overall in 2014, the sixth round, six seasons, 204 games, 64 points across St. Louis and the Rangers, and a Stanley Cup in 2019.
26 goals in six years, and a season lost to injury in 2021-22 after fourteen games with the Rangers.
He is twenty-seven, back at the club that drafted him, in a bottom-six role. The 9th-percentile chance share is the honest measure and the plus-4 is not.
What he is for is the fourteen minutes a night nobody wants to play, at a size and a temperament that make them survivable.
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 nasty and plays a heavy game below the goal line, which is the only way a forward that slow holds an NHL job.”
“He wins the wall by leaning on people rather than by getting there first, and at 206 pounds it works often enough to keep him in the lineup.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 781 minutes
- Expected goals
- 43.6%
- 13th pct
- Shot attempts
- 45.8%
- 21st 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: 33 for, 25 against. Expected: 23.8 and 30.8.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 30 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 — 64 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 · 71 games
- Top speed
- 20.6 mph
- 6th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.15 a game
- Distance
- 1.91 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 87.9 mph
- 54th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
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 · 406 minutes at five-on-five
- Brandon Saad24%
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
- STL took 45.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.6% — 2.2 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 781 minutes at five-on-five — 38th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Julien Gauthier | 38.5% | 44.8% | 46.7% |
| Colton Parayko | 41.5% | 44.2% | 45.5% |
| Braden Schneider | 43.4% | 43.6% | 42.9% |
38.5% together, 44.8% for him apart and 46.7% for Gauthier apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.
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
100 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 10 feet. 56% of his shots came from inside twenty feet.