Getting to know Colton Sissons

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Welcome to the first in a series of profiles of newly acquired players. There were so many that it was impossible to really understand them all on July 1, but with the first preseason games this weekend, it's time to evaluate them all more fully. I have borrowed aspects of Brian's prospect profile posts for this series because I find that format useful. This first profile is one of the group of similar forwards signed to a short-term contract.

Colton Sissons was signed by the Leafs on July 1, 2026 to a two-year contract for an AAV of $4.25 million, an amount just over the average NHL salary of last season ($3.97 million).

The Basics: Vitals and Stats

• Age: 32 (turns 33 in November)
• Position: Centre/Right Wing
• Height: 6'1"
• Weight: 201 lbs
• Draft: 50th overall in 2012

Stats

Sissons played his entire career in Nashville until last year, where he had a reduced role in Vegas. He dropped from third-line minutes and the sixth-most used forward on the Predators to under 13 minutes per game and the eleventh-most used on a better and deeper team with a more heavily rotating cast of forwards. He plays both special teams, albeit more on the PK than the PP.

Advanced Stats

Personal Shooting

Moneypuck shows him with 0.64 Expected Goals per 60 minutes last season. He scored seven on ten expected.

Moneypuck's evaluation of individual shooting talent has Sissons at 7-8 percent below average in the last couple of years after a career of mostly average ability. The numbers above do a good job of showing how much or how little that actually matters for him. He has a low shot rate of 8.6 Individual Corsi per 60 minutes on his career, meaning he is the sort of player who picks his moments, and as the graph above shows, he gets a high Expected Goals per 60 minutes because of his mostly net-front shooting.

Evolving Hockey's RAPM model shows him as a plausible PP2 player if needed, but his primary value is in his impacts on shot differential at both ends of the ice as well as quality of shots against. The poor showing in impact on Goals For is not a measure of his personal shooting, but measures his impact on his own and his teammates' actual scoring. This measure is the most volatile of the RAPM values and I don't find it very helpful.

HockeyViz shows Sissons as a career third-liner with mostly defensive skills, who has declined in value recently. Individual impacts vary from year to year, as they do in the Evolving Hockey RAPM results, but do conform to a pattern of defence value greater than offence along with some decent personal shooting for a bottom-six centre. He has had two years of scoring below expected by that model as well.

His career faceoff record is 54% as a regular centre taking hundreds per year. He blocks a lot of shots, but doesn't give the puck away much – an indication he doesn't handle the puck a lot as much as anything else.

NHL Edge shows him with a very high max skating speed last season of 23 MPH, and above average numbers of speed bursts.

Highlights

From his most recent Nashville year, this video shows his direct and consistent offensive game. He goes to the net. That's it, that's all he does.

He also runs to the scrum:

The Good:

Sissons is an average sized forward, a good centre with speed and physicality. He gets into net-front positions very often, does not shoot indiscriminately and is a very defensively responsible depth centre. He is engaged fully, gets into the action when things get physical and plays a very simple game that isn't going to surprise any of his wingers.

The Flaws:

If the Monepuck shooting talent measure is taken as who Sissons is rather than what he did last year, he may be losing his ability to cash in on his net-front shots. This is very weakly supported, and shooting is not really the meat of his game.

He is not a creator of offence, and in Vegas particularly, he was a net drain on offensive pace.

He is showing expected age-related decline, although not in skating speed.

Overall Assessment

He doesn't have any particular role-specific skills that are above average aside from skating speed and his faceoff ability. But for his level, that's not surprising. He doesn't have any great flaws either.

Sissons is likely to be tried out as the 3C on the Leafs which would get him more minutes than he did in Vegas, and that fact might be exactly why he signed in Toronto. His cap hit is a lot higher than projected by the Evolving Hockey model, and it only really seems like good value if he gets better results than he has in his last two seasons. However, the market for centres and the extreme need on the Leafs made them focus on this position. There's no question, this is not a cap-space efficient deal, though.

How you view this choice by the Leafs likely depends on several factors, notably what the third line is supposed to be doing. If they're a shutdown line, then he seems like a good bet to be useful as a solid centre who isn't going to drag down the wingers by being too slow. I struggle to imagine him as a winger, and it seems certain he will play as a C in the bottom six.

He doesn't add a lot of offensive value, but he isn't going to skate in real fast, shoot the puck into someone's shinpads and then get off on a change. He also isn't going to lag behind more offensively gifted wingers. So he is neither Nick Robertson nor Dakota Joshua, and is therefore an improvement over what last season's depth got up to.

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