Earlier this week I wrote about Mark Scheifele, a centre who scored 103 points while his team got out-chanced with him on the ice. The lesson there was that points and play-driving are different things, and that the box score can flatter a player whose team plays no better with him than without him. This is the other side of that coin. Meet the player the box score undersells.
Brandon Hagel scored 74 points for Tampa Bay last season. A very good total, not a headline one, the kind that gets a winger mentioned in the second paragraph of a team preview. But the 74 points are the least interesting thing about his season. What makes Hagel one of the best forwards in the league is everything the point total does not capture.
| Player | Points | On-ice xGF% | On/off swing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brandon Hagel | 49 | 60% | +9 |
| Mark Scheifele | 65 | 48% | +1 |
At five-on-five, with Hagel on the ice, Tampa Bay controlled 60 percent of the expected goals. That is an elite, drive-the-bus number, the kind you expect from a first-line centre on a contender. Without him, the Lightning were a 51 percent team, still good, but nine points of expected-goals share worse. Hagel does not ride his team's results. He lifts them. Set him beside Scheifele, whose team was a 48 percent club with him on the ice and a 47 percent club without him, and the contrast is the whole argument: one player pads the score sheet, the other tilts the rink.
The finishing is real too
The easy dismissal of a play-driver is that he does the grunt work but cannot score. Hagel closes that door. He scored 36 goals on 34 expected, meaning he did not just generate chances, he buried them at a rate slightly above what the quality of his looks predicted. That is the profile of a complete offensive player, not a defensive specialist who occasionally chips in. He is a legitimate scorer who also happens to be one of the best defensive forwards in the league, kills penalties, and takes the hard matchups rather than hiding from them.
And he does it without shelter. Scheifele started 70 percent of his five-on-five shifts in the offensive zone, the deployment you give a player you are protecting. Hagel's starts were split far closer to even, which means the 60 percent share came against tougher assignments and from worse ice. A player who drives play from neutral deployment is doing something categorically harder than one who feasts on offensive-zone starts, and the numbers know it even if the highlight reels do not.
So why isn't he a star?
Some of it is position. Wingers who are not 45-goal snipers rarely become marquee names; the two-way winger is hockey's least glamorous elite archetype. Some of it is market and team. Tampa Bay's story for years has been Kucherov and Vasilevskiy and Point, and a very good supporting star gets absorbed into "the Lightning core" without a separate identity. And some of it is simply that the thing Hagel is best at, making his team better whenever he is on the ice regardless of whether his name hits the score sheet, is invisible to anyone not reading the underlying numbers.
The honest counter
To be fair to the point-scorers, totals are not meaningless, and a great power-play producer delivers value a five-on-five merchant does not. Scheifele's 103 points came with genuinely elite man-advantage work, and there are game states where you want the pure finisher on the ice. This is not a claim that Hagel is simply better than every higher-scoring forward in a vacuum. It is a claim that if you rank forwards by point totals alone, you will systematically undervalue the players whose worth shows up in the share rather than the summary, and Hagel is the clearest example in the league.
The bottom line
Brandon Hagel is not a secret to the people who watch Tampa Bay every night, or to the coaches who have to plan around him. He is a secret to everyone else, because the one number most fans use to rank forwards, points, is the one number that undersells him. He scored 74 and drove his team like a player who scored a hundred. In a league that hands its awards and its attention to the biggest totals, the most complete winger in hockey keeps doing the quiet work that wins games and waiting for the rest of the sport to notice. Watch the share, not the score sheet, and he is impossible to miss.