We weren’t sure if we should recap Tanner Jeannot’s season since it’s been a few months since the trade, but he was on the original list, so here we are. If he didn’t come with quite so much trade baggage and his cap hit was about a million dollars cheaper it wouldn’t have been a bad season.
The Basics
Name: Tanner Jeannot
Position: Forward
Counting Stats: 55 Games, 7 Goals, 7 Assists, 12:01 TOI
Extra Stats (5v5): 50.82 CF%, 49.01 SF%, 40.91 GF%, 48.69 xGF%, 53.93 HDCF%, .908 On-ice Save Percentage, 5.96 iXG
2023-24 Contract: First year of an 2-year contract with an AAV of $2.665 million
Contract Status: He will be entering the second year of his 2-year deal worth $5.33 million. He will be an unrestricted free agent after this season.
The Charts
The Review
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
For Tanner Jeannot, the burden Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner was no bird, but the price the Tampa Bay Lightning paid to acquire him at the 2023 trade deadline. Anything less than a 30-goal season or Stanley Cup-clinching goal would anoint the deal one of, if not the worst, trade in Lightning history.
We all know the basics, because they’re mentioned like a byline anytime anyone writes about him, of the deal that brought him in: Cal Foote, a 2025 first-round pick, a 2024 second-round pick, and their third, fourth, and fifth round picks in the 2023 draft. That haul seemed a burden that The Oxbow Ox never seemed to be able to get out from under. Various injuries throughout his brief career in Tampa and an inability to produce points for a team that desperately needed depth scoring led to a wide amount of scorn from the fanbase.
It is, at times, baffling that his Lightning career didn’t produce more. The solid parts of his game and his underlying stats indicated that he would be a good fit for a team that wanted to establish an identity of a team that generated offense and forced turnovers with a heavy forecheck. The big (6’2″, 208-pound) forward played a physical game that fans love and often led to opponents getting rid of the puck before they wanted to, which often led to neutral zone turnovers.
In that sense, Jeannot did what he was supposed to do last season. Despite appearing in just 55 games, he led the forwards with 182 hits and All Three Zones had him ranked well about league average in recovered dump-ins. In his own zone, he was pretty responsible as well, grading out well in successful exits and zone clearings.
Unfortunately, the actual putting of the puck in the net never really materialized when he was on the ice. Sadly, even with all of the statistical information available to us these days, that remains quite important in determining the outcomes of games. For a player that was billed as a middle-six forward, his 1.78 GF/60 at 5v5 play was well below expectations. The only forwards that generated goals at a lower rate were Waltteri Merela, Luke Glendening, and Tyler Motte.
One of the huge outliers of his rookie season in Nashville when he scored 24 goals was the fact that he shot 19.4%. We all knew that wasn’t sustainable and he showed that in his first season with the Bolts shooting 5.0% in 20 games in 2022-23. That number jumped back up last season as he scored 7 goals with a respectable 11.85% shooting percentage. The only problem was that he didn’t shoot the puck quite as much. His 5.36 shots/60 was 11th on the team among players with more than 10 games under their belt. It was also the second-lowest rate of his career.
Despite the lack of shots, it wasn’t a horrible season for Jeannot. Hockey Viz, which uses synthetic points as a catch-all stat, graded him out with second-line production:
A lot of that was predicated on his play in his own zone and that a lot of the shots that came when he was on the ice were from productive areas. The flipside is that Jeannot and his linemates just weren’t able to finish off those chances.
That pretty much sums up Jeannot’s time with the Lightning. When he was on the ice, he helped do some good things that never translated into goals. Had Julien BriseBois acquired him for a couple of mid-round picks and a middling prospect, perhaps a lot of the ire fans directed at him would have been dampened down. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
In the off-season, Mr. BriseBois recouped some of the assets by trading Jeannot to Los Angeles for a 2024 fourth-round pick and a 2025 second-round pick. He had also re-acquired the fourth-round pick he sent Nashville prior to the 2023 draft and used it to draft Jayson Shaugabay. In the end, Jeannot appeared in 75 games for the Bolts with 8 goals and 10 assists. In another 7 post-season games over two years he had one assist.
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