Once seen as one of the draft’s premier prospects alongside Shane Wright and Matthew Savoie, Lambert has experienced a sort of fall from grace as he pushes through what has surely been a frustrating draft season. A midseason move to Lahti took Lambert, still one of the youngest players in the Liiga, to his third professional team: he played a handful of games for HIFK (including his debut as a 15-year-old) and suited up for JYP last season and the first half of this one. After a solid season last year, considering his age, Lambert’s progression has stalled. He had only six points in his first 24 games with JYP and the change of scenery doesn’t seem to have done Lambert any good, as he has just three points in 21 games with the Pelicans. Lambert’s tremendous skill level will still make him an attractive choice at the draft, but his stagnation is a red flag that will likely keep him out of the top five and possibly even the top ten.
Lambert is a fascinating player to watch, with emotions ranging from excitement to frustration. He is a dynamic offensive threat, pairing excellent skating with nearly equally strong hands. Those are the traits of a terrifying rush threat, a persona that Lambert, when on top of his game, is capable of adopting. He struggles to deploy his skills to their full extent. A player of his calibre should not be contained as easily as Lambert currently is. Lambert is quicker and more skilled than a majority of his opponents but tends to be one of the least impactful players on the ice. A full-time role in professional hockey is impressive on its own at 18, but Lambert is towards the end of his second full season now and has not yet shown any sign of grasping this level of competition. Lambert is, in my eyes, the most interesting player in the draft: the flashes of brilliance are tantalizing and the skill is very surely there, but to this point, the results are not. How should a team value that type of prospect? It’s a question with no confident answer.
| Brad Lambert | Date of Birth: 2003-12-19 |
|---|---|
| Position: C/RW, Shoots: R | H/W: 6'0", 179lbs |
| Stats to Date: (GP-G-A-PTS-PIMS) | Pelicans, (23-2-1-3-12) |
Skating
Lambert is an excellent skater, displaying a rare combination of very quick feet and a truly powerful stride. Many players have one or the other, but the possession of both is a luxury enjoyed exclusively by some of the best skaters in the world. He liberally employs lateral crossovers, usually traversing the neutral zone by chaining several in a row in one direction, then several more the opposite way. A separator for Lambert is his ability to threaten almost two-dimensionally with his skating off the rush– he is of course a great threat to blow right past a defender in a straight line, but his wide-ranging lateral motion as he mixes in crossovers creates additional issues for the opposing defence. Case in point: Lambert’s speed pushes the two defenders back, forcing them to reduce their speed at the blueline to close the gap and creating a favourable speed differential for Lambert and his teammates. Lambert’s crossovers take him to the near boards as he does this, pulling both defencemen to their right. The result: Lambert’s teammate capitalizes on both the speed differential and the open far side of the ice, driving past the far defender for a great tip opportunity in front of the net. Even on a play where Lambert stops up immediately after crossing the blueline, his skating is what creates the opportunity!
Of course, Lambert is also able to use his speed for more direct contributions as well. He’s a constant rush threat with the quickness to beat any defender wide at any time, which has finally begun to translate into some pretty sweet-looking plays for him at the professional level. The finishing is a work in progress, but it’s promising for him to be creating these opportunities at all. You can see how absolutely lethal Lambert can be when he’s attacking a bad gap– the defenceman is nothing more than a stationary pylon to him.
Lambert could carve out an NHL career just for his utility on powerplay entries alone. It’s the perfect situation for him– he is an excellent skater who gets to prey on stationary defenders. He faces a little more resistance this time, but still glides right through the defence.
Grade: 65
Shot
Lambert hasn’t scored a whole lot of goals over the last two years, as should be expected for a teenager in professional hockey. He has eleven goals in his Liiga career and a handful more in international play over a couple of seasons– far fewer goals than most prospects of his calibre are scoring at his age, but most prospects of his calibre are playing at significantly lower levels of competition. His shot is pretty good, he just hasn’t had a whole lot of opportunity to use it. Lambert is more of a finesse scorer, often finishing from close quarters after using his speed to get to the net and relying far more on shot accuracy than power.
These two goals demonstrate his scoring profile quite well: he’s not shooting lasers by any means, but he’s still fully capable of beating goalies from intermediate areas by picking his spots.
On rush opportunities, Lambert shortens his release and looks to get the puck past the goaltender before they can effectively react. He manages to snap the puck under the goaltender’s arm on this opportunity.
It takes impressive coordination and accuracy to roof a puck on the backhand like this while moving with speed on the rush.
Lambert’s shot isn’t any sort of special weapon, but he’s accurate enough to score from the slot and has the quick release to beat goaltenders on rush chances. He has the shot to be an above-average NHL goalscorer if his other skills can generate enough opportunities for him.
Grade: 55
Skills
Lambert is a very skilled puckhandler. When he was still in the junior circuit a few years ago, he had a McDavid-esque dynamism to him– the ability to handle at an incredible top speed in a manner that can just totally overwhelm defenders. He’s simplified things at the professional level, so it isn’t something as easily witnessed anymore, but the skills are still there. The area where we still catch glimpses tends to be on zone entries, where we’ve already seen Lambert’s ability to pylonize defenders. He was doing that just with his skating alone– add in an impressive set of hands, and he’s an even more difficult player to stop at the blueline.
Lambert uses a shimmy move to fly past the defender at the line, ultimately creating a grade-A chance for his teammate.
This is a really creative entry play from the same game– putting it around the defender, skating onto it, then making a quick continuance play into the slot. The ability to make that subsequent pass is the difference between this move creating a potential slot chance and it becoming a puck battle on the wall– in some situations, I think the inability to make that play has been one of the factors in Lambert’s pro-level struggles. He does well here.
Lambert’s puck skills maximize the value of his skating because his hands often are able to match the speed of his feet. This sharp change of direction at the offensive blueline is a massive entry weapon– how do you stop that? Lambert is able to make that play because he has the skill to pull off that toe drag into his feet, a move that is immensely difficult at that speed.
Many terrific skaters are held back by their puck skills– they can never attack with the full extent of their speed, because they can’t handle the puck effectively at that velocity. I don’t see Lambert as being one of those players. He’s capable of doing some very impressive things with the puck at top speed and his hands seem to augment his speed, rather than detract from it.
Grade: 65
Smarts
Lambert is a difficult player to wrap your head around, because he has extraordinary skill and yet has struggled so mightily to consistently express his skills in the Liiga. The general culprit for skilled players who don’t achieve results is their intelligence, but for Lambert, I think he is both in that camp but also outside of it. I don’t view Lambert to be an unintelligent player; I think he’s still just yet to learn how to properly use his skills against high-level competition in the Liiga, and that’s the root of his troubles. The issue, though, is that Lambert’s spent two seasons now playing professional hockey and seems to have moved backwards rather than forwards results-wise. There comes a point when someone’s struggles to learn something causes you to question them and you begin to shift away from when they will learn to if they will learn. That is about as best as I can articulate my thoughts on Lambert: he is a complex, complex enigma– about as difficult as it can get for a scouting staff and development team. The team that drafts Lambert will be a team that embraces challenge.
The first issue is the perimeter-oriented nature of Lambert’s game. Speed is far less of a weapon if you’re only using it up and down the boards and Lambert has demonstrated a reluctance to use it any more than that. He’ll have the occasional flash of brilliance where he goes through a bunch of defenders like in some of the clips above, but a lot of rush attacks are quite basic and end up looking like this:
I don’t think Lambert is a particularly good passer– it’s certainly not as big a part of a skillset as some of his other tools, especially at the Liiga level. It’s not that his vision or even necessarily his intelligence is poor: he can make some nice continuance plays at times like the one we saw in a clip in the skills section. When you’re moving as fast as Lambert often does, it’s extremely difficult to find a good passing option– partly because it’s just difficult to scan when you’re so focused on skating and partly because he ends up so far ahead of his teammates that they struggle to support him. If you watch McDavid, his best passing doesn’t occur when he’s skating at his top speed, for the same reasons as above. The difference is that McDavid practices a lot of speed variance– the only time he really brings the puck forward at full speed for an extended period is when he decides to go superhuman and undress an entire team himself– and he uses the slower periods to scan and find passing lanes. He’ll enter the zone, slow up to manipulate the defence and assess his options, and then either make a pass or quickly accelerate back to top speed. Lambert, in contrast, will almost always churn his feet as fast as he can from the moment he begins to skate with the puck to the time when it leaves his stick, usually on a shot from a bad area. Lambert doesn’t give himself any opportunity to succeed as a passer, whereas McDavid does.
When Lambert does look to pace on the rush, he often only does so after stopping up at the wall. At that point, he’s killed all of his momentum and is a static threat whose options can easily be blocked. These plays very rarely amount to any sort of play into the slot; Lambert usually looks for a trailing defenceman who is showing up late to the play and poses little danger. That tendency is demonstrated well in these three entries:
Given his level of skill, the inability of Lambert to develop consistent methods to express those skills in ways that lead to opportunities and points over two seasons in the Liiga is fairly concerning. It’s a tougher environment for Lambert than for a lot of prospects, which I recognize, but at some point he has to figure things out and the longer he goes without doing that, the less likely it becomes that he ever will. I don’t necessarily think that he doesn’t have the vision or the awareness for a higher grade here, but he doesn’t express it often, and smarts is the most fitting category to dock Lambert for his inability to translate his skill into impact. For those reasons, I give Lambert a 45-grade for his smarts.
Grade: 45
Compete/Physicality
Lambert isn’t one to throw his weight around, and even if he was, he doesn’t have a whole lot of weight to throw around. His skillset really isn’t geared towards the physicality aspect of the game at all– he’s a speedy, finesse player who doesn’t need to outmuscle anybody because he can usually just outskate them. His relentless speed can be an asset in puck races like this one.
He also uses his stick effectively on the forecheck, using his speed to get in on defenders really quick and then tying up their stick so they can’t move the puck.
And he even can use the body a little bit, using velocity to compensate for limited mass. This is an effective check to win the puck for his team.
Lambert’s speed is his greatest weapon, both with and without the puck, offence or defence. He moves his feet, applies pressure quickly, and is generally quite effective when he’s trying to win a puck, whether it be on defence or on the forecheck. He deserves credit there.
Grade: 50
OFP: 58
Skating 65; Shot 55; Skills 65; Smarts 45; Physicality/Compete: 50
A note on the 20-80 scale used above. We look at five attributes (skating, shooting, puck skills, hockey IQ and physicality) for skaters and six for goalies (athleticism/quickness, compete/temperament, vision/play reading, technique/style, rebound control and puck handling). Each individual attribute is graded along the 20-80 scales, which includes half-grades. The idea is that a projection of 50 in a given attribute meant that our observer believed that the player could get to roughly NHL average at that attribute at maturity.