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

Tage Thompson

Forty-seven goals on the hardest shot measured in the league, which is what that shot looks like when it works.

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

2017-18	STL	41	3	6	9	-12	12	0	0	0	55	5.5	11:55
2018-19	BUF	65	7	5	12	-22	20	1	0	0	108	6.5	12:08
2019-20	BUF	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	—	6:59
2020-21	BUF	38	8	6	14	-6	17	2	0	0	96	8.3	13:52
2021-22	BUF	78	38	30	68	-17	37	10	2	4	253	15.0	17:53
2022-23	BUF	78	47	47	94	+4	39	20	1	7	295	15.9	18:35
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	301	103	94	197	-53	125	33	3	11	807	12.8	15:28

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

47 goals and 47 assists in 78 games — 94 points at 18:35 a night, plus-4, with 20 power-play goals and 7 game-winners on 295 shots, converting at 15.93 per cent, and 39 penalty minutes.

Forty-seven goals is the most by a Sabre since Alexander Mogilny, and it arrived in a fourth NHL season after three that produced 38 goals in total. 50.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,089 minutes, the 59th percentile; his ice went 68-59 against an expectation of 58.19-56.06.

The Finesse Game

His shot is measured at 101.7 mph — the 100th percentile, the hardest of any skater in the league.

This book has already recorded two men at that velocity who could not score with it: Radko Gudas made two goals of it and Mathew Dumba four. The difference is where the shot is taken from. Gudas shoots from a median of 54 feet with 4 per cent of his attempts inside 20; Thompson shoots from 31 feet with 29 per cent inside 20. A hundred-mile-an-hour shot from the top of the circle with a screen is unstoppable; the same shot from the blue line through four bodies is a rebound. That is the whole lesson and Thompson is the demonstration of the useful half.

47 assists says the passing is real too — he is not a one-timer and nothing else.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 220, and the reach is a genuine weapon — he handles the puck a stick-length outside where a defenceman expects it to be, which is why he gets shots off from places that look covered.

The skating is unremarkable for a man his size and unremarkable full stop: 22.0 mph at the 36th percentile. He is not going to beat anybody wide, and the game is played standing in space rather than skating into it.

The Intangibles

Twenty-sixth overall in 2016 to St Louis, and he arrived here in the Ryan O’Reilly trade as the piece nobody was talking about.

He is 25 with 103 goals in 301 games, 47 of them last season. The question every 47-goal season raises is whether it repeats, and here the honest answer is more encouraging than usual: 15.93 per cent shooting on 295 attempts from 31 feet with the league’s hardest shot is not obviously luck. The risk is the club around him rather than the number.

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
78 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
sheltered· is started in the attacking end
64% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 95th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
defends-with-reacha strength· takes the puck before the contact happens
“he handles the puck a stick-length outside where a defenceman expects it to be, which is why he gets shots off from places that look covered”
playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“47 assists says the passing is real too — he is not a one-timer and nothing else.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,089 minutes

Expected goals: 50.9%; 59th pct
Shot attempts: 53.5%; 82nd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 68 for, 59 against. Expected: 58.2 and 56.1.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

92nd

Numbers

59th

The report ranks him 33 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 120 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 75 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.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 1089 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: BUF took 49.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.9% — 1.1 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 1,089 minutes at five-on-five — 69th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jeff Skinner	52.0%	46.6%	54.1%
Alex Tuch	52.4%	48.1%	52.6%
Rasmus Dahlin	54.7%	47.7%	52.9%

52.0% together, 46.6% for him apart and 54.1% for Skinner apart. He was worse away from Skinner, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Skinner 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

413 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 48 of them goals. His median goal came from 23 feet. 29% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 25% from beyond forty.