This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Tage Thompson
Buffalo Sabres Center
Forty-seven goals on a shot measured at 101.7 mph, 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 101.69 mph — the 100th percentile, and the second-hardest in the league behind Radko Gudas, by two hundredths of a mile an hour.
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 a shot nobody in the league beats by more than two hundredths of a mile an hour 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, 96th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
“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”
“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
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: 68 for, 59 against. Expected: 58.2 and 56.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 27 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 — 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.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 78 games
- Top speed
- 22.0 mph
- 44th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.65 a game
- Distance
- 2.90 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 101.7 mph
- 100th 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 · 1089 minutes at five-on-five
- Jeff Skinner76%
- Alex Tuch64%
- Jack Quinn11%
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.