Hockey Bytes: Sam Reinhart and the Career Year That Wasn’t
Plus, Sidney Crosby's place among the most balanced offensive players in NHL history.
Welcome to Hockey Bytes — a weekly NHL column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various hockey spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Hockey Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🧊 Regression? Never Heard of It
The Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup win last season was fueled by a combination of factors: The offensive firepower of Sasha Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk and Carter Verhaeghe; Sergei Bobrovsky’s timely goaltending; Gustav Forsling’s two-way impact from the blue line; and the team’s radical transformation from an offense-first finesse squad into a gritty, all-around powerhouse.
But one of the most unexpected elements behind Florida’s rise to the top of the league was the play of forward Sam Reinhart.
In his previous nine NHL seasons, the former No. 2 overall pick in the draft had been plenty solid, notching 25 or more adjusted goals six times and 60 or more adjusted points four times. But he never had anything approaching a superstar season in the same way that, say, Leon Draisaitl (the guy drafted directly after him) had when he won league MVP in 2019-20. Reinhart seemed destined to always be a good, respected player at both ends but by no means a star.
Then last year happened. In his third season with Florida, Reinhart obliterated his previous career highs with 56 adjusted goals, 92 adjusted points and 25.1 adjusted Goals Above Replacement, the latter of which ranked eighth in the league and sixth among forwards. Capping it off with a Stanley Cup — Reinhart had 10 goals and 16 points in 24 playoff games — was the cherry on top of what The Hockey News described as a “once-in-a-lifetime season”.
The trouble with those is that they tend to only happen, well, once in a player’s lifetime. And Reinhart’s career year already had little precedent in the annals of out-of-nowhere performances.
Among NHL forwards since 1943 with fewer than 80 career adjusted GAR going into their age-28 season (Reinhart had 77.5), only late-blooming Martin St. Louis of the 2003-04 Tampa Bay Lightning — also a Cup winner, incidentally — had more adjusted GAR at age 28 than Reinhart. Or, if we frame it a different way, only St. Louis had fewer adjusted GAR through age 27 among players who popped off a 25+ GAR season at age 28:
Either way, the odds were against a repeat performance in 2024-25, if not just because things like outshooting your previous career scoring percentage by over 10 points don’t tend to carry over from season to season. But incredibly, Reinhart has not only matched his career-best marks from a year ago, but he is now skating past those numbers, too.
(Note: All stats are as of Monday morning, Nov. 25.)
That’s… not really supposed to happen. And it may well not persist, as Reinhart’s scoring percentage is now up to an absurd 28.6 percent this year — well beyond what was considered a bit of a fluke last season.
But other aspects of Reinhart’s production, such as his greatly improved assist numbers, may reflect new ways for him to contribute to Florida’s title defense. While some of those helpers were compiled while Barkov and Tkachuk were out of the lineup earlier in the year, Reinhart recently had a 3-assist game against Winnipeg — more than he’d put up in all but one game over the entirety of last season.
Which is to say: Reinhart may be stacking an unexpected second “career year” on top of his first in a way we haven’t ever really seen before. (Even St. Louis never again eclipsed his GAR from that 2003-04 campaign over the rest of his Hall of Fame career.) Let’s see if he can keep on rolling.
🧊 Stay Balanced
It’s been a good month for superstar milestones in the NHL. First, we had Connor McDavid hit 1,000 points; then, in maybe the only bright spot from an otherwise miserable Pittsburgh Penguins season, franchise icon Sidney Crosby scored his 600th career goal this past Saturday, joining a club with just 20 other members in NHL history.
It was a reminder of just how special of a player Crosby has been over the years. Some stars are pure snipers, and some are pass-heavy playmakers. But Crosby has been both at various times in his career. He has exactly 15 seasons of at least 30 adjusted goals and exactly 15 seasons of at least 50 adjusted assists. No other player with as many in one category has that many in the opposite as well.
Does that mean Crosby is the most perfectly balanced scorer/passer in NHL history, though? To examine this, I looked at the Top 100 players in career adjusted points, and calculated their collective ratio of adjusted goals and assists to points.1 Among our group, exactly 39 percent of their points were goals and 61 percent were assists. So who came closest to matching that “ideal” blend of sniping and playmaking?
Perhaps surprisingly, it was not Crosby (who came in 16th), but rather it was longtime Ottawa Senators forward Daniel Alfredsson. He, along with Steve Yzerman and Bernie Nicholls, had precise ratios of 39 percent goals and 61 percent assists in their careers. They were the platonic ideal of scorer/passers… at least if you think the average ratio across a bunch of great players is what everyone should aim for.
(Ironically, Crosby’s longtime frenemy Alex Ovechkin is at the furthest opposite end of the spectrum, with the most imbalanced ratio — 56 percent goals and 44 percent assists. That’ll happen when you are the greatest goal-scorer of all-time.)
Of course, there are a lot of different ways to be an elite player, so it would be silly to force Ovi to primarily be a passer or make Adam Oates be a sniper. But when someone like Crosby comes along who can do both an at elite level for such a long time, it makes us appreciate their skills all the more.
Filed under: NHL, Hockey, Hockey Bytes
We could have used the ratio of regular, non-adjusted stats here, but I like how adjusted assists also account for the changing ratio of leaguewide assists per goal over time.
In Reinhart’s time with the Sabres, new GMs and coaches floated in with the frequency low-pressure systems dropping lake-effect snow on Buffalo. There was instability there behind the scenes—that I know from folks who worked in various regimes. Definitely stunted development of some—Eichel was not on a good track there. I had Draisaitl over Reinhart on my list, saw and talked to both—I can vouch that a Buffalo scout working for Tim Murray said there was no taking a Euro with the no. 2 pick. I do think situations/perceptions work into this—St Louis didn’t get the opportunities bc it was perceived that someone his size couldn’t play in the league—if he had been a high draft pick or any draft pick, an organization would have given him a harder early push.