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Thompson’s Resurgence Catalyzing Sabres’ Offense

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Following Tage Thompson’s lackluster scoring campaign in 2023-24, fans of the Buffalo Sabres largely believed that his struggles were due to a lingering wrist ailment. As a player who earns much of his production via his elite shooting ability, any injury to the upper extremities would naturally lead to some downturn in production. 

Fortunately for everyone who wants to see the Sabres break the league’s longest playoff drought, the injury theory from last year seems correct. A now-healthy Tage has registered seven goals and 11 points through nine games this season. That puts him on pace for 64 goals and 100 points over an 82-game clip. 

That total would be a welcome improvement from the 29 goals and 45 points he produced last season. While it’s still too early in the year to glean much from underlying statistics, there are other aspects of Thompson’s game that have stuck-out in the early going, independent of his elite skillset as a shooter. 

Let’s ingest a pterodactyl-sized grain of salt and look at some numbers, shall we? 

Tage, the Speed Demon? 

Despite his stature, Thompson has never been considered a slow skater. Even amid his struggles in 2023-24, he still ranked in the 75th percentile or better in most skating metrics according to NHL EDGE.  

That’s pretty impressive for a 6-foot-6, 220-pound player. Surprisingly, early returns this season suggest that he’s skating even faster so far this season.  

As you can see, his 20+ MPH skating bursts have eclipsed the 90th percentile league-wide. He’s leveraged this into an increased propensity to produce scoring chances on the counter-rush. 

The entire first line of Thompson, Alex Tuch, and JJ Peterka seems to be operating in another gear in general. It has allowed them to become one of the top transition-offense lines in the NHL right now. Thompson and Tuch are two of the NHL’s top five producers of shots of shots off the rush. 

There’s a lot of hockey left to be played, so we’ll see how these numbers hold up throughout the year. If the Sabres’ top line can manage to maintain something resembling their current proficiency in offensive transition, they’ll be a matchup nightmare for opposing teams in 2024-25. 

Baseline Underlyings 

In analytics, we often speak about sustainability, especially as it pertains to production (or lack thereof) early in a season. Players can go on PDO benders which can produce box score numbers that aren’t reflective of their expected production.  

I’ll stress that this phenomenon tends to be exacerbated in severity under such a small sample size. Fortunately, in Thompson’s case, the early returns on his base underlying numbers indicate that his box score results aren’t some lucky aberration. 

After nine games, he is the team leader in virtually every offensive underlying metric. He ranks first on the team in xGF rate (63.31%), Corsi rate (64.14%), and xGF/60 (3.5), according to Natural Stat Trick.  

This can be attributed to his line’s proficiency off the rush, but their aptitude on the offensive cycle shouldn’t go unnoticed. The way Thompson, Tuch, and most recently, Peterka have not only maintained possession but also created scoring chances on the cycle has been outstanding as well.

The only aspect of his game that seems likely to, at some point, regress back toward the mean is his shooting percentage. Thompson’s career-high shooting rate came in 2022-23 when he converted shots at a 15.9% clip. Through the first nine games this season, he’s converting 23.3% of his shots.  

For reference, the NHL’s leading shot-percentage leader last season was Sam Reinhart at 24.5%. The next closest player was at 21.4%, so the aforementioned rate Thompson currently holds isn’t likely to be sustained. There is, however, a decent chance that the inevitable regression will be modest enough to not impact his production noticeably.  

Closing Thoughts

It has been nice to see Thompson, and by extension, Alex Tuch, regain form in the early going. The potency of the Sabres’ top line was always going to be a critical piece to the organization’s campaign to finally make the playoffs after all these years. 

The last time the top trio produced the way they are currently, was in 2022-23, the year they missed the postseason by a mere point. We’ll have to wait and see if they can sustain it, but for Thompson in particular, there is very little in the existing data set (again, small sample alert) to suggest that a regression of significance is inevitable.  

Advanced Metrics courtesy of Natural Stat Trick and NHL EDGE

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