There are not a lot of players who have the ability to change the complexion of a hockey game on a consistent basis. As a result, these players are very well known. They’re the ones fans see on billboards and TV ads, whose names top the list of jersey sales, who fly off the board of fantasy hockey drafts before you can even blink.
Noah Cates is not one of those players, and he almost certainly never will be. Take a look at his surface-level stats, and you’ll see a good but not great third-liner. Cates’ scoring pace dipped a little bit from his 16-game NHL audition in 2021-22, but 38 points is nothing to scoff at. Putting up points in all three situations (5-on-5, power play and penalty kill) is fairly impressive as well. His underlying numbers don’t look great at first glance (47.06% Corsi, 48.27% expected goals), although as most savvy fans could probably guess, they look better if you compare them to his teammates on last season’s below-average Flyers team.
But digging a little deeper paints an intriguing picture. Anyone who watched the Flyers last season or is an advanced stats savant knows Cates is much more valuable than what shows up on the back of his hockey card. Last year, he established himself not just as a full-time NHLer, but as one of the league’s top defensive centers. He didn’t exactly slip under the radar in doing so — Cates finished 15th in voting for the Selke Trophy, becoming the first rookie to receive votes for the award since Anthony Cirelli in 2018-19.
An Elite Defensive Forward – Already
That impressive recognition still might underestimate his impact, though. The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn’s model put Cates in the 93rd percentile for defensive impact (from ‘NHL Player Cards: Philadelphia Flyers,’ The Athletic, April 3, 2023). JFreshHockey’s model bumped him all the way up to the 100th defensive percentile, putting him at the top of his class. Evolving Hockey’s xG Regularized-Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) metric ranked Cates as the league’s second-best shutdown forward behind only Radek Faksa (from ‘Flyers’ Noah Cates thrived as a rookie. Now he looks to take further steps,’ The Athletic, Aug. 9, 2023).
Related: Revisiting the Flyers’ 2017-18 Prospect Pool
Cates has always been billed as a smart, two-way player. However, his rise last season cannot be understated, not only because of just how good he was defensively, but because he did it at center, a position he had never played full-time. He had gotten some work down the middle during his college days at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, but he spent the majority of his time there at left wing, which is also where he began his NHL career in 2021-22. The Flyers may not have even used him at center if Sean Couturier hadn’t suffered a setback before the start of last season that ultimately kept him on the shelf all season. Cates’ transition to center was just as much made out of necessity as a belief he could thrive down the middle in the world’s best league.
He did just that and against some of the world’s best players to boot. Cates quickly won over John Tortorella during training camp and earned the right to match-up against some of the league’s top talent. Those game-changing household names often struggled against Cates. Just look at how Connor McDavid faired against the Flyers with Cates on versus off the ice in two games last season.
| Corsi For% vs. Cates | Corsi For% vs. Rest of PHI | xG% vs. Cates | xG% vs. Rest of PHI | |
| Game 1 | 50% | 66.67% | 34.97% | 67.7% |
| Game 2 | 63.64% | 68.18% | 58.01% | 80.4% |
Offensive Promise Is There
Of course, defense isn’t everything in hockey, especially for a forward. But Cates does have offensive ability. When the Flyers drafted him 137th overall in the 2017 Draft, one of the first things many Flyers fans saw of the Duluth, Minnesota, native was an amazing overtime winner in the 2016 Minnesota Section 4AA high school playoffs. At Minnesota Duluth, Cates scored at nearly a point-per-game pace (33 points in 34 games) as a sophomore, and he showed progress offensively as last season progressed. Through the first three months of the campaign, he scored 0.35 points per game but bumped that figure up to 0.48 the rest of the way.
Cates will have value even if he doesn’t make meaningful progress beyond what he showed last season. But there’s no reason to believe the 24-year-old will stagnate. As he continues to get used to playing center and the Flyers become a better team around him,his offensive game should come around a bit more. He’s never going to be a team’s leading scorer. However, if Cates can take the leap into the 50-60 point range, his value would skyrocket exponentially. That would make him an undisputed second-line center, potentially making him the perfect yin to the yang of the offensive-minded Cutter Gauthier, a top center prospect who is expected to join the team after his season with Boston College ends.
Making that jump won’t be easy, but neither was learning a fairly new position on the fly against the game’s top talents. Cates proved he could handle that, and as a result, anyone doubting his potential impact may want to reconsider his limits.
Advanced Stats via Natural Stat Trick unless otherwise stated