How Tage Thompson became the NHLs unlikeliest superstar

Publish date: 2024-10-11

On Dec. 7, Mike Cavanaugh was out to dinner and his phone wouldn’t stop vibrating.

UConn’s head hockey coach excused himself from the table to check his phone. When he opened it, he had 17 text messages and wondered, “What is going on?”

Then he looked and saw Tage Thompson, his former player, had five goals in the first two periods for the Buffalo Sabres. Five goals. The goals ranged from routine to breathtaking and Cavanaugh watched the highlights in amazement before returning to his table.

“It’s fun watching him turn into a bona fide superstar,” Cavanaugh said.

That game turned into Thompson’s second six-point game of the season and was the night his star status was solidified. His 38-goal season from a year before could no longer be written off as a fluke, and his $50 million contract went from a gamble to a bargain.

His star turn brought a new sense of optimism to the Sabres. Buffalo’s hockey team has gone 11 seasons without making the playoffs, and it was getting harder and harder to find hope through that decade of darkness.

Buffalo sports fans are familiar with that storyline. They endured a 17-year playoff drought with their football team. The Sabres and Bills both joined their respective leagues in 1970 and neither has a championship to show for it.

Josh Allen helped lift the musk of mediocrity off the Bills franchise over the last five years, transforming himself from a raw and inconsistent quarterback to one who combines prolific passing numbers with a punishing running style. With him under center, the Bills feel like a perennial contender.

Thompson has become that beacon of hope for the Sabres, who are trying to turn the page on their own dysfunctional era. Like Allen, Thompson blends size and skill like few in his sport ever have. And like Allen, his stardom wasn’t inevitable. Both players needed time, patience and the belief of those around them when so many outside of Buffalo harbored doubts.

Brendan Buckley, who was an assistant coach at UConn when Thompson was there, checks Sabres boxscores on a nightly basis. “It’s gotten to the point where I almost expect him to score,” he said.

Thompson heads into All-Star Game break this weekend in Florida with 34 goals and 68 points in 50 games. Whether he plays in the game is suddenly uncertain after he picked up an injury in Wednesday night’s game. But it wasn’t long ago that it seemed unlikely Thompson would ever dominate in the NHL the way he has this year.

“I don’t think everybody would have made it through what he made it through,” Buckley said.

Tage Thompson. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

In 2016, Thompson was a late first-round pick, a shiny new prospect for the St. Louis Blues.

In 2023, Thompson is a superstar, a goal-scoring behemoth for the Buffalo Sabres.

Getting from Point A to Point B, however, wasn’t always inevitable. To truly understand Thompson’s meteoric rise, you probably have to start in the middle: After the draft-day optimism and before the breakout-year hype.

After three years in the St. Louis organization, Thompson had played only 41 NHL games and 46 games in the AHL. But current Blues goalie Jordan Binnington, who played with Thompson in the minors, “could see the potential was there.”

Around that same time in Buffalo, Ryan O’Reilly was making it clear he wanted to play elsewhere. So in the summer of 2018, then-Sabres general manager Jason Botterill dealt O’Reilly to the Blues in exchange for a 2019 first-round pick, a 2021 second-round pick, Patrick Berglund, Vladimir Sobotka and Thompson. Blues general manager Doug Armstrong said Botterill insisted Thompson and the picks be the basis of any package.

O’Reilly and the Blues won the Stanley Cup the next season. O’Reilly won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs MVP, and the photo of him drinking beer out of the Stanley Cup became the picture of another Sabres trade gone wrong. Berglund played just 23 games for the Sabres. Sobotka played 85 games and had 16 points. The team finished in sixth place in the division. And fans were in despair.

But Thompson was there and he was adjusting to the change just fine. He had moved around a lot as a kid because his father, Brent, played and coached pro hockey. Moving wasn’t a problem. He attended 11 different schools before graduating high school.

“That helped me adapt to this lifestyle,” Thompson said.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t challenges. Thompson’s first year in Buffalo wasn’t a rousing success. He had only 12 points in 65 NHL games that season. To make matters worse, his wife, Rachel, found out she had a cancerous mass on her leg. Thompson was with the Sabres in Columbus when he got the news. She needed surgery to have the mass removed and all subsequent scans have come back clean.

That scare gave Thompson perspective on what was becoming a grueling stretch of his hockey career. The next season, he played 16 AHL games and one NHL game before injuring his shoulder. He needed surgery and missed five months.

Under former Sabres coach Ralph Krueger, Thompson’s career looked doomed. After returning from shoulder surgery, he ended up on Buffalo’s taxi squad during the 2020-21 season. At one point, the Sabres went 18 games without a win. Then, Krueger was fired and replaced by assistant coach Don Granato, Thompson’s former coach in the United States National Team Development Program.

Thompson was finally turned loose and he slowly started to get more ice time. He finished with eight goals and six assists, but seven of those goals and four of those assists came in the final 21 games.

So the five-season statistical picture wasn’t pretty. From 2017-21, Thompson’s points-per-60 ranked near the bottom among forwards who played over 1,000 minutes. It’s the same story for his impact on scoring chances at both ends of the ice.

To Thompson’s credit, there was some year-to-year improvement. But there wasn’t much reason to be overly optimistic about his NHL future. He was entering his age-24 season and while that’s not old, it’s not young either. At that point, what you see is usually what you get.

At the start of the 2021-22 season, Thompson was projected to be worth exactly zero wins. He was a replacement-level player. But Granato saw something different. He sat down with Thompson and told him he was ready to be an NHL goal scorer now, not some time off in the future. With disgruntled center Jack Eichel soon on his way to Vegas, Granato put Thompson at center on the top line.

“You see the way he’s working and you know the potential is there,” Granato said. “Now what can we do on our side to help him?”

Adding Alex Tuch, acquired in the Eichel trade, to his line was a bonus. Thompson scored 38 goals and had 30 assists in his breakout season. Teammates and opponents now struggle to find a historical comparison for him. Of players 6-feet-6 or taller in NHL history, only five forwards and four defensemen have more goals than Thompson. All have played at least 300 games more than Thompson.

Then there’s his jump in production. Going back to 2007, there were 100 players who were a statistical match for Thompson’s size, age, usage and projected output at the age of 23. Five of them were difference-makers at or near the top of the lineup.

But not a single one matched what Thompson has become two seasons later: He’s now a bona fide star.

Projecting a player’s future is far from an exact science. Every player’s path is unique and there will always be outliers. But it’s unheard of to see an outlier of this magnitude. Players like Thompson at 23 don’t do what Thompson does now at 25.

“I think it’s human nature to try to compare people to others,” Thompson said. “And I think with our sport, it’s so unique and there’s so many different variables that can make you a good player and make you unique. It’s kind of tough to pinpoint one player and try to compare them. I think everyone’s their own person, their own player, and they’ve got their own way of finding their game, and sometimes it takes a little bit longer.”

The chances of Thompson becoming a star were slim, but there were glimmers of stardom within that list of cohorts.

Thompson’s most similar match was Joe Colborne, a 6-foot-5 first-round pick who struggled early before things finally clicked at 25 … for a short period. Lower down the list, the similarities begin to wane and that’s where late bloomers like William Karlsson, Chandler Stephenson and Valeri Nichushkin reside. Karlsson’s own “out-of-nowhere” breakout offers the closest emulation to Thompson’s, though he struggled to stay at that level. Karlsson’s regression is why many expected Thompson to follow a similar path after his first breakout at 24.

But for every best-case scenario, like Karlsson, there were even more cases where a player didn’t make a lasting impact or any impact.

Buffalo sports fans have seen a version of this story before. Just 13 miles south of Buffalo, Josh Allen was an anomaly in terms of his development. Like Thompson, he was lightly recruited coming out of high school, getting just a single scholarship offer from Wyoming. He and Thompson were both first-round picks, and while Allen carried the pedigree of a top-10 pick, he also had doubters.

He had a 56 percent completion percentage in his final year of college. According to Football Outsiders, between 2005 and 2018, the only other players to get drafted in the top 100 picks with a completion percentage below 58 were Andrew Walter, Jake Locker, Christian Hackenburg, Connor Cook and C.J. Beathard. Locker, who started 23 games in the NFL before retiring, was the most successful pro of that bunch.

Even after two NFL seasons, Pro Football Focus studied quarterbacks with similar efficiency to Allen through two NFL seasons to determine what statistical progression was likely. They determined that while he wasn’t “doomed to failure” his path to success would be an anomaly. Statistically, Allen didn’t stand a strong chance of becoming an efficient quarterback, let alone a superstar who has three straight seasons with more than 40 total touchdowns.

Before Allen, no quarterback had ever thrown for 4,000 yards and rushed for 750 in the same season. He’s done it twice. He also became the first quarterback to ever throw for 4,000 yards, at least 30 touchdowns and run for eight more touchdowns. Much like Thompson, it’s fair to say Allen is peerless in both his skillset and his statistical jump.

Buffalo has two unicorns. It also has two franchises that helped foster the right environment for those players to develop. The Bills were steadfast in their belief that Allen had the capacity to improve his deficiencies. They became convinced of the person as much as the player during an exhaustive pre-draft process that included two daylong meetings with members of the front office, coaching staff and ownership. And while Allen’s first two seasons were uneven, Bills GM Brandon Beane surrounded him with more talent, adding Stefon Diggs in 2020. After Allen’s breakout season in 2021, Beane was quick to sign him to a $258 million extension.

Thompson didn’t have the benefit of the all-hands-on-deck approach to development that NFL teams take with their quarterbacks. But he had the right coach at the right time. When Thompson scored his 30th goal last season, Granato leaned over on the bench to congratulate him. Then he reminded him, “You and I both know there’s a lot more here.”

The Sabres backed that up by signing him to a seven-year, $50 million extension over the summer after one season that was an outlier in terms of production. They thought it was just the beginning. The deal already looks team friendly. So far this season, he’s improving on last year’s numbers and is scoring highlight-reel goals with regularity.

Thompson said he always had the ability to handle the puck this way, he just wasn’t in the right role. He credits Granato for taking that chance on him.

“It would’ve been very easy for him to put me in a bottom-six role and just be safe the way I was playing the previous years,” Thompson said. “But he stuck his neck out for me and gave me an opportunity.”

Granato explained what was in his mind. “Somebody has to give you an opportunity in any business anywhere,” he said. “I saw a guy that was doing all the things and just needed opportunity.”

Granato saw the same thing back in 2014 when Thompson was a teenager trying out for the United States under-18 team. A few weeks earlier, he had been cut by Granato at a regional camp in Syracuse. But a few alternate spots opened up at the Buffalo regional camp, and Granato gave Thompson another opportunity.

Cavanaugh, the UConn coach, was at the camp recruiting and found himself drawn to a 6-foot-2 forward with unusual skating and stickhandling ability for his size.

“I remember watching the game saying, ‘Who is this kid? He doesn’t even have a number,’” Cavanaugh recalled. “And then we found out who he was.”

Thompson’s father was a bruising defenseman during his playing days. He tried to get Tage and his brother Tyce to play defense at first, but Tage didn’t take to it. And because he was late to grow, no other coaches tried to shoehorn him into playing defense, either.

Before he grew, Thompson developed his game like a smaller, skilled forward. He always had good hands and he thinks it’s because he spent so much time around pro hockey players as a kid. As he grew, he came to love watching Penguins star Evgeni Malkin, another taller forward who has always been a scoring threat.

While Thompson was growing, he had to learn how to move each time he sprouted a few inches.

That didn’t stop in college and continued into the NHL. When he first got to the Sabres, he was listed at 6-feet-6. He’s now listed at 6-feet-7. He’s continued to add strength and body mass.

“For the last three or four years, it’s just been continued adjustments,” Thompson said.

In Thompson’s first year playing for Cavanaugh, he had 32 points in 34 games and led the country in power-play goals with 13. He scored most of those goals with the same overpowering one-timer that’s made NHL goaltenders uncomfortable. That shot, like the smooth-skating, long-limbed sniper himself, is one of the wonders of the NHL these days.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever see one like it again,” Cavanaugh said.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: Claus Andersen, Bill Wippert / Getty Images)

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How Tage Thompson became the NHLs unlikeliest superstar