Top draft picks always get the press, regardless of the sport, and regardless of the talent. Even if a “better” player is drafted fifth overall, the player drafted first will get the lion’s share on physical or digital ink for years to come. It is just the nature at being the top of a list of elite performers in any industry.
That is what makes the fan/media pressure put on New York Rangers forward Alexis Lafrenière not unique; Nail Yakupov and Nathan MacKinnon went through the same thing years ago.
What is new, to an extent, is the situation Lafrenière finds himself in. A lot of first overall picks find themselves in horrific situations, beginning pre-Lafrenière:
- Yakupov’s Oilers picked first overall three years in a row, which should give an idea of where the franchise was at that time.
- MacKinnon’s Avalanche had missed the playoffs two years in a row and tied for the lowest win total in the West the year he was drafted.
- Aaron Ekblad’s Panthers had given up the most goals against the year he was drafted, and had reached the playoffs once in the prior five years (zero series wins).
- Then we get to the Matthews/McDavid/Hischier/Dahlin drafts, and we all know what the Leafs, Oilers, Devils, and Sabres were like in the mid-2010s.
In short, for at least the decade prior to Lafrenière’s selection, first overall picks were walking into awful situations. The highest hopes were that the pick could bolster the young group already assembled and kick the rebuild into high gear. That has happened to varying levels of success.
When Lafrenière was drafted first overall, the Rangers lucked out at the Draft Lottery. They had qualified for the league’s extended Bubble postseason, finishing the regular season tied for 18th by points percentage. Their loss in the qualifying round pushed them to the Lottery and a lot of luck pushed them to first overall. It wasn’t a pick the Rangers were ever supposed to get; the team was ninth in the league in 5-on-5 goal scoring that year, sandwiched Toronto and Pittsburgh. Artemi Panarin had 95 points in 69 games while Mika Zibanejad had 41 goals in 57 contests. This was not a normal lottery team by any stretch of the imagination.
That is why it’s important to highlight two things about Lafrenière that differs him from other first overall picks:
- He was drafted in October as it was still early in the COVID pandemic. His last game in Junior was on March 21st, 2020. He did not play another game until his NHL debut 10 months later.
- He was going to a team that didn’t really need his services as they had Panarin and Chris Kreider on the left side, with both having long-term contracts in their pockets at this point.
Lafrenière was not only going to have his development stunted to some degree – as many draft picks and prospects would that year – but he was going to a situation where he would not get featured. When thinking of the power play in general, Panarin and Kreider were going to be around long-term, and Ziba likely would too once he extended his contract, which he did. That left one spot on the top unit, and Ryan Strome’s PP prowess played well for the Rangers. To sum it all up: he was going to a team that did not have a spot for him on their top two scoring lines, had a small chance of him earning top PP time, and that situation would not change anytime soon. Unless he quickly advanced to being a 20-year-old superstar scorer, Lafrenière would not be a feature player for the Rangers for years to come.
With all that context provided, let’s look at Lafrenière’s career to date. We will look at each season, what happened in each season, progressions or declines, and whatever else is relevant. The primary sources will be Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, HockeyViz, or Corey Sznajder’s game-tracking Patreon.
Rookie Year
Lafrenière stepped onto a good team, of sorts, but one in some turmoil. It might seem like a lifetime ago, but remember when Tony DeAngelo was put on waivers because he fought his own goalie less than three weeks into the regular season? And the team, improved a lot defensively thanks to Adam Fox showing up, was still average-ish in its own end. Welcome to the NHL, Laffy.
His raw totals didn’t make for a great rookie year with 12 goals and 21 points in 56 games. The thing about that stat line is he did it all at even strength and all while skating under 14 minutes a night. Even then, on a raw total basis, he scored as many even-strength goals as Zibanejad and Panarin. On a 60-minute basis, Lafrenière’s primary points rate at even strength (1.56) was higher than other young guns like Brady Tkachuk (1.35), Tim Stützle (1.35), Jack Hughes (1.32), and Andrei Svechnikov (1.24). When we take all even-strength points into account, he still exceeded all those names.
To be sure, part of it was luck with his 18.2% shooting, and we’ll get to that, but he was producing very well for a young player in the league.
The curious part of his rookie season was how well he played with Zibanejad, but not by all measures. It might seem confusing, but the reality here is that Zibanejad was Lafrenière’s most common line mate at even strength, but Laffy spent just 35% of his TOI with him. In other words, the young first overall pick saw a lot of different line mates, spending at least 60 minutes with eight different forwards in his 56-game campaign. For a comparison, he spent at least 60 minutes with only seven different forwards in 2022-23, a year he played 81 games and reached a career-high in TOI per game. That is a lot of instability for a first overall pick that went 10 months without a hockey game during a pandemic.
Pavel Buchnevich was a big part of Lafrenière’s success in his rookie season. While Laf played most often with Zibanejad, the 21-year-old’s most-common winger was Buchnevich. Here is the offence the Rangers generated with Laffy-Buch on the ice at 5-on-5 in the Bubble 2021 season:
That isn’t great, but it wasn’t significantly better without the St-Eustache native on the ice:
The extra 8% of expected goals generated is nice, but the Rangers scored 21% more often when Buchnevich had Lafrenière beside him than without. That season, Buchnevich had the second-highest scoring chance production of any Rangers forward (Panarin higher). It put him in company with names like Mark Stone and Evgeni Malkin:
The now-Blues winger being able to constantly create scoring chances for Lafrenière to finish was a big key to Laffy’s early scoring success. Aside from Filip Chytil – and we’ll talk about him at length a bit later – Buchnevich had the most assists per minute played alongside the first overall pick in his rookie season than any other forward. That includes those that got more minutes with him, like Zibanejad.
There was some good for Lafrenière, outside of the scoring. His expected goals-for impact was second among Rangers forwards, behind only Strome, and he had a higher controlled zone entry percentage than Kreider or Zibanejad. Some of the micro stats weren’t sterling, but he was helping his team create shots and, more importantly, goals. He also did that with a rotating cast of line mates while getting third-line minutes.
The last thing I’ll note is where Laffy scored his goals. This is a chart of his shots at 5-on-5 from his rookie season and the red dots/squares, aside from the face-off dots themselves, represent his goals:
Every single Lafrenière goal at 5-on-5 was scored in the green home-plate area extending from the goal line to the face-off dots and into the slot. For comparison, over a quarter of the 5-on-5 goals scored by Zibanejad and Panarin that season were scored from outside that home-plate area. Despite Laf taking a fair number of shots from distance – 13% of his shots on goal were on attempts from over 30 feet away even though Zibanejad was under 10% – he was finding his scoring success by getting to the net, or close to it, as a quarter of his goals were tips or deflections (all those red squares around the crease). He was the only Rangers forward credited with more than one goal by deflection. Yes, that includes Kreider, whose goals are typically classified as tips. Either way, three tipped/deflected goals on 11 such shots will help a player’s shooting percentage.
All in all, it was a good rookie campaign. The goals-per-minute stood out more than anything, but he was showing early offensive chemistry with not only the higher-end guys like Zibanejad and Buchnevich, but the young group like Chytil and Kaapo Kakko (to lesser degrees). He was finding goals the way a lot of coaches would prefer, and that’s by being within 25 feet of the net. A promising start, even if his raw point totals weren’t there.
Sophomore Season
Due to a cap crunch – the reasons for which we’ll not get into now – New York had to trade Buchnevich in the 2021 offseason, and Laffy lost a productive winger because of it. Despite that, he actually scored more frequently at even strength (1.13 per 60 minutes) in his second season than his first (1.02). He skated virtually the same amount per game as he did the year prior, but the rates went up despite Buchnevich being gone. Not bad.
He skated 1007 minutes at even strength and, again, could not get consistent line mates: in the 2021-22 season, Lafrenière did not spend 40% of his even-strength minutes with any one forward (closest was Chytil at 39.9%, and I’m being a pedant). Even for the Rangers, this is unusual, as Chytil had Laf for nearly 50% of Chytil’s EVTOI while Zibanejad had Krieder for the whole season. It was another season of moving the young winger all across the lineup looking for the right mix.
Before diving into the stats for the season, the overall point just made is one I want to reiterate: they weren’t letting Lafrenière make mistakes. They couldn’t afford to; this was a team in its Cup window even though they lucked into a first overall pick. Let’s compare with rookie forwards in 2022-23, and I’ll focus on the ones from teams that didn’t get to the postseason (that means no Matty Beniers or Cole Perfetti). Here are some rookie forwards this season and their most-common line mates by even-strength TOI percentage shared:
- Kent Johnson – Jack Roslovic at 38.7%
- Mason McTavish: Max Jones at 44.1%
- Jack Quinn – JJ Peterka at 57.9%
- Mattias Maccelli – Lawson Crouse at 70.3%
Those are just four I picked at random and only one had a season comparable to the first two that Laffy had, line mate-wise. He was also a guy debuting on a team that was looking to make a playoff push that flamed out spectacularly, so maybe a lesson to be learned here.
Regardless, a lot of rookies are allowed to fail because the team’s success doesn’t hinge on them being a high-quality NHLer at that time. It is hard to say for certain that was not the case for Lafrenière without being the coach of the team, but it seems a reasonable guess that a team in a Cup window would not endure months of under-performance, whether real, perceived, without making changes. That would include just a quick slump from any of their non-elite forwards.
There has to be under-performance, though, right? If guys are playing well, we don’t break them up? I ask because Lafrenière was playing extremely well on New York’s top line in 2021-22. Here is how they performed when he was with the team’s top trio by expected goals for/against at 5-on-5 on offence (red is good) and defence (blue is good):
Without just slapping a bunch of viz up here, the top line performed about the same without Lafrenière by expected goals for/against, but there’s a twist: the team scored nearly 13% more often with Lafrenière there than his replacements. We wouldn’t want to rely just one that one sample of 259 minutes, so we’ll note that in Laf’s rookie season, the Rangers scored nearly 23% more often at 5-on-5 when Zibanejad had him on his wing than when Laf was down the lineup. We now have parts of two seasons, totaling over 530 minutes at 5-on-5, of Lafreniére helping the top line score about 10% more often with roughly the same volume of shot attempts (actually a small decline). Generating a lot of shots is one thing, and would be nice to see, but finishing the shots you do create at a high rate, over two different seasons, is a great sign.
There was also individual improvement on Lafrenière’s behalf by various stats:
- Even strength defensive impact improved considerably from the literal 8th percentile in his rookie year to the 64th percentile, or a mid-tier second-line impact. That is a huge jump.
- High danger shot attempts rose from 30.8% of his total shot attempts at even strength to 32.2%.
- 11th percentile in scoring chance contributions to the 19th percentile, which isn’t big but it’s something we’ll come back to in his third season.
It was another campaign where Lafrenière didn’t have great raw stats with 19 goals and 31 points in 79 games, but almost all of that came at even strength once again. His primary points/60 at even strength in 2021-22 was 1.39, about a second-line rate. Not great, but not awful, and comparable to names like Alex DeBrincat (1.42), Jordan Eberle (1.41), Ryan O’Reilly (1.38), and John Tavares (1.35). When looking at just his even-strength goals/60 minutes (1.13), he was easily a first-line rate and ahead of both current teammate Kreider and former teammate Buchnevich. Lafrenière wasn’t racking up assists, but he was scoring very well. Again.
Remember earlier when Lafrenière’s goal-scoring locations from his rookie season were discussed? It was found that every single one of his goals were scored from the home plate area at 5-on-5. How about his sophomore season? Well…
Again, every single goal from the home plate area. In his first two seasons, Lafrenière scored 29 goals at 5-on-5, and every single goal was from the home plate area. He was not thriving by adopting the Zibanejad/Panarin approach to goal-scoring; he was thriving by doing the opposite. He was getting a lower share of shots from tips or deflections, and that isn’t always a good sign, but he was improving elsewhere. It seemed like a reasonable progression for a young player.
To wrap up the goal-scoring portion here, we will look at how well Laf scores from those areas. Thankfully, HockeyViz not only shows us goal locations, but where a player is better/worse than the league average by finishing rates. Here is Laf’s rookie season with the red areas being where he finished plays at a higher rate than the league average:
And here is his sophomore season:
Two seasons of above-average finishing around the home plate area, and in some cases well above league average, but below-average outside of it. Just to compare to one of his teammates, here is Panarin’s finishing chart from the Bubble 2021 season:
Notice how he scores much more than league average from outside the dot but struggles on one side of the net? It’s not quite a mirror image of Laf’s, but I think we get the idea here.
The 2022 playoffs were good for Laf (nine points in 20 games) but it’s fair to wonder if it was him or Chytil, as the latter was outstanding in the 2022 postseason. All the same a good performance.
At this point, Laf has finished his second year in the NHL. He had just 31 goals and 52 points, but every single goal was at even strength. Because of that, and his relatively low TOI, he led the Rangers in goals per minute at even strength over those two seasons (1.09). The only other Rangers forward above 0.95 was Kreider at 1.05. Across the league, among 280 forwards with at least 1250 even-strength minutes in those two seasons, Laf was tied for 55th in goal rate. That put him as a low-end first line forward by goals/60, in line with names like William Nylander (1.06), Zach Hyman (1.07), and Jeff Skinner (1.11). The lack of assists kept his points rate low and his declining reliance on deflected shots was a worry, but the goals were there, and the defence was getting better. There are worse places to be for a 20-year-old than ‘scoring at a top-line rate for two years in a row with much-improved defensive play.’
Year Three
This is where things really start changing.
Lafrenière’s goal rate crashed from over 1.0 per 60 minutes at even strength in each of his first two seasons to 0.7 in 2022-23. However, he registered a career-best point rate at even strength (per minute and per game) thanks to an assist rate that rose more than the goal rate dropped. He also shot 11% at even strength after shooting 19% across his first two seasons, so that was absolutely part of it.
When a player, whose calling card for two years was “really good goal scorer in limited minutes,” sees a noticeable goal decline despite nearly 120 more minutes of total TOI and 25 extra shots on goal, it’s the first thing that piques my curiosity.
A handful of paragraphs earlier, we talked about how Laf was excellent at finishing around the net and poor at finishing from distance. It was how he helped Kreider and Zibanejad reach another level offensively, for as good as they were already. So, how did Lafrenère manage this season? It wasn’t great.
Earlier, it was mentioned 13% of Laf’s shots on goal in his rookie season were on attempts from outside 30 feet. That is something that has not improved much as he still sits at 12.1% (for reference, Zibanejad’s was under 10% two years ago and was over 20% this past season, which is really not good). In total, in 2021-22, Laf’s percentage of shots on goal from inside 15 feet was 35.5%, the exact same rate it was the year before. That is what makes the following chart more curious, as his shot distance ratios didn’t change much:
He struggled to finish around the net much more than either of his first two years. There are any number of reasons for this, including a change in how teams defend, the exact nature of his in-close shots, and just pure luck. That can be completed with some game tracking, but the big change in his shots came from the non-deflections. He had just 10 goals on 95 wrist/slap/snap shots (10.5%) compared to 20 goals on 135 such shots (14.8%) his prior two years. Laf also scored his first goal from outside the home plate area, the only 5-on-5 goal of his regular season career from outside that area, which I’m including just because it’s neat.
So, the 2020 first overall pick struggled to finish but picked up the slack in his assists. What happened there?
Well, first, he simply added passing to his repertoire. It is one thing to say he wasn’t much of a passer in his earliest seasons, it is another to show what that looked like, so let’s do that. Here are the players with comparable Scoring Chance Assist rates (just assists on a teammate’s scoring chance, or CA/60) at 5-on-5 for the 2021 Bubble Season:
And for 2021-22:
It wasn’t just bad luck or a lack of ice time that kept Lafrenière’s assists low. Maybe playing so much with Kakko, who has not been a game-breaking finisher, didn’t help, but Laf was just not passing the puck. He was the finisher, not the setter.
This was not the case in 2022-23 as his playmaking numbers took a sharp turn. He went from a scoring chance assist rate that was easily among the bottom half of the league, to this:
Almost regardless of the offensive stat, going from a group that includes Jeff Carter and Mattias Janmark to one that includes Jack Eichel, Clayton Keller, Andre Burakovsky, and Jared McCann is worth noting. There was a very good reason that Laf’s assist rates shot up to new highs, and adding 63% to his scoring chance assist rate was a big part of it.
It was also the first time Lafrenière had some stability to his line mates. He spent over 680 minutes with both Kakko and Chytil as the trio formed (or re-formed) the Kid Line. That level of ice time means Laf spent over 60% of his even strength TOI with those guys. They were really good, too, controlling nearly 54% of the expected goals and over 60% of the actual goal share.
This is where the offence was generating the offence with the Kids on the ice at 5-on-5, with the red areas being where they focused their attack:
It is a weird little gap, but we can see that there was a lot of attention paid to rebounds, deflections, quick one-timers, and back-door tap-ins, and not so much getting good shots from the slot. It was a change from the year prior as they did generate a fair amount from the high slot:
Regardless of where they were getting their shots from, with the Kid Line on the ice, the team scored 3.5 goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 in the 2022-23 season. When they were on the bench, that dropped to 2.7 goals/60. In fact, over Laf’s three seasons in the NHL, the Rangers have a higher goal rate with him and Chytil on the ice (2.78) than with Kreider and Zibanejad on the ice (2.72) at 5-on-5. Quality of competition and zone starts and all that, sure, but being a third line and outscoring the top line over a span of three years should speak to the upside that Kid Line still has, either as a whole or spread across the lineup.
Despite a good season on the third line, Lafrenière’s expected goals impacts took a dive at both ends of the ice. This is where I wonder if the way the team plays had an effect on what the expected goals outputs are. Guys like Panarin and Zibanejad are notorious for having their personal puck skills out-shine the expected goals impacts, and it seems to be a strategy that permeates the lineup. Not only did the Kid Line focus on redirections and back-door tap-ins, eschewing the slot, it was something the whole team did:
We could say that all the players should feel the same effects, but Kreider, Vesey, and Kakko all had really good expected goals impacts. If I were to hazard a guess, it’s that Kreider and Vesey do a good job getting to the net offensively (which helps offensive xG impacts) while Kakko is a forechecking machine who can help turn pucks over. Lafrenière, on the other hand, is a scorer that is trying to incorporate different offensive dimensions into his game at a young age, and on a team less focused with traditional slot shots and more with puck movement. The expected goals impacts don’t worry me too much because it’s yet another season of a Lafrenière line (this time with Chytil) scoring very well, and much better than they otherwise fared without him.
This was also a season where the Rangers were pushing for a Cup and brought in a bunch of players: Vesey was brought in the just before the season and had a good year; Trocheck was signed to replace Ryan Strome; the team acquired Patrick Kane and Vladimir Tarasenko near the Trade Deadline. There were a lot of players brought in at various points of the offseason, or regular season, that would eat directly into Laf’s role, if not necessarily his ice time. The list of players with PP priority over him seemingly grew with each passing month. That may not be the case in 2023-24, given the expiring contracts, so maybe this is finally the year he gets that PP time.
On the bright side, he earned a career-high 111 minutes of total PPTOI. The downside is just 17 of those minutes were on the first PP unit. In fact, of Laf’s 275 minutes of PPTOI in his career, he has spent a grand total of 53 on the top PP unit. They weren’t productive minutes for the top PP unit, either, which is why Laf didn’t last long. But, the real problem here is Laf and Kreider have played the same role on different PP units, and Laf is not going to overtake Kreider as long as the latter can still lace his skates. The only way Lafrenière gets productive top PP time is if Kreider falls off the map or Laf learns to finish from distance. Gotta say: don’t like those odds.
The final note is that the young left winger got to the net (or net-like area) a lot more than he did the year before, posting 30 shots via deflection or tip. That was seven more than his first two seasons combined. He scored five goals by tipping a shot, more than anyone on the team but Kreider, and as many tip/deflection goals as he had in his first two seasons. Not only did he add some playmaking, but he was creating more of those Kreider-like slot-area redirections more than ever.
So, here we are at the end of Laf’s third season. His goal rate went down but his assist rate spiked thanks to a genuine effort to develop the playmaking dimension of his game. That led to a career-best points rate and vastly improved scoring chance contributions, even if his expected goals impacts fell off (which, as I explained, is not a huge deal right now, in my opinion). Those Scoring Chance Contributions, which were a big problem early in his career, have climbed from a third-line rate to a first-line rate in two years. It isn’t to say it will keep rising, but even just maintaining his scoring chance creation numbers would leave him in the top 25% of the NHL’s forwards. There is absolutely no doubt there has been huge improvements across his offensive game.
As for the point totals, let’s do a a bit of math. If Laf had shot 17.5% this season, as he averaged his first two years, he would have scored 24 goals. That would have pushed him to 47 points in 81 games. It still wouldn’t sound great, but his points per 60 minutes at even strength would climb from 1.88 to 2.31. That difference is basically going from Kyle Palmieri-level production, on a per-minute basis, to Evgeni Malkin. That was the difference in Laf shooting 11.9% in 2022-22 as compared to 17.5% in his first two years.
There is a lot of consternation in Rangers fandom, and the media in general, with Laf’s performance, it seems. Three years in the NHL and the number-1 pick still doesn’t have a 20-goal or a 40-point season. When it’s put like that, it sounds quite bad.
That doesn’t tell the story, though, does it? He was drafted at a time unlike any other in NHL history and probably lost development because of it. He was thrust onto a team that had immediate Cup aspirations. Not “we hope to contend five years from now” aspirations, but “we should win a Cup in the next five years” aspirations. He was not given a chance to develop like other top picks normally would, which is at the top of the lineup playing with whatever top players the team has. What if he had been drafted by Detroit and was skating with Dylan Larkin these last three years? Or Los Angeles and he’s skating 18 minutes a game with Anze Kopitar? Instead, he played third-line minutes with the team’s third liners, getting secondary PP time, for two years, because the team was ready to push for a Stanley Cup immediately. And, in his third year, more minutes didn’t necessarily lead to higher-end line mates, it just meant more time with his fellow third liners.
In general, I also wonder about players adapting to the new NHL style. The game has transformed dramatically in just the last five years alone. If he’s drafted in 2010 and just has to stand at a dot to rip wrist shots, it’s very possible this isn’t even a conversation. There is a lot – a lot – of east/west passing these days, and it took him until Year 3 to really get comfortable with it when looking at his playmaking numbers. He appeared to be learning not only how to succeed at the NHL level, but also changing his game in real time, to try and make himself more viable for his coaches.
This is, in no way, a player to give up on. This is not a guy to go trade for, say, Filip Zadina or Philip Broberg in a change-of-scenery deal. There are clear signs of improvement here and the one thing that held him back from really good per-minute production this season was a drop in shooting percentage. Whether that’s here to stay, we’ll see, but just looking at his raw numbers tells so little of the story that it does everyone a disservice. Even then, the only people that know the real story are the coaches and the player(s). Yes, I saw the comments made by former Rangers goalie Steve Valiquette regarding Laf’s offseason training.
Whether Lafrenière turns into a bona fide superstar scoring winger like a Kirill Kaprizov or Kyle Connor is certainly up for debate. What I don’t think is up for debate is that he has been good offensively and has shown improvements in a lot of areas that should see him get even better. Whether he can mesh with the way Panarin and co. play is something they have to figure out, but the skills and upside are still here, and the results have been largely good. It is hard to exercise patience with a first overall pick after three years, but this is not a normal situation, and just looking at point totals will miss a lot of the reasons why patience is not only necessary, but justified.
Cliffy's hell-hole 