Adam Lowry

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

13 goals and 23 assists in 82 games — 36 points — at 15:39 a night. Plus-4, 126 shots at 10.3 per cent, three shorthanded, 48 penalty minutes.

36 points is a career high by seven, in his ninth season.

53.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 968 minutes, the 72nd percentile, with his ice at 33-36 against an expectation of 41.11-36.26 — eight fewer goals scored than the chances called for, which is where the plus-4 stops being a plus-15.

He started 30.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 3rd percentile: 181 attacking draws against 406 defensive ones.

The 72nd percentile of chance share out of the 3rd percentile of starts is the best deployment-adjusted season on this club and one of the best in the edition. Thirty-six points is what the box score kept.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 17 feet, with 55 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 11 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 68 shots on goal and 11 goals — 16.18 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 33 shots and one goal, 3.03 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 18 shots and one goal.

Sixty-eight shots on goal from inside twenty feet from a checking centre is a very large close-range volume, and it comes from where he plays rather than from anybody setting him up.

182 tracked attempts, 91 of them wrist shots, 34 tip-ins — an 18.7 per cent share — and no slap shots at all. His shot is measured at 84.5 mph, the 10th percentile.

93 goals in 621 career games at 10.8 per cent, and ten career shorthanded goals, which for a man who has never scored fourteen in a season says exactly where he spends his ice.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 210 pounds, with 48 penalty minutes in 82 games and 335 in 621 career games.

Top speed 22.3 mph at the 51st percentile, 1.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 66th, 2.50 miles a game at the 42nd. Average in every direction, at 6-5.

He is punishing, he forechecks by hitting, and he finishes every check available to him, which is the reason a coach hands him four hundred defensive-zone draws.

He wins the wall and protects the puck below the goal line, and at six foot five with a long reach that is how a checking line gets out of its own end.

He kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw, which the zone-start column makes visible even though this project cannot see who wins a faceoff.

The Intangibles

Sixty-seventh overall in 2011, the third round, nine seasons, 621 games, 204 points, all of them here, and the captaincy.

93 goals and 111 assists, and a plus-15.

He is thirty, and he has spent nine seasons doing the job that makes Mark Scheifele’s 92nd-percentile deployment possible.

A third-round pick who becomes a captain by taking the third percentile of zone starts is the clearest single example in this book of the thing the box score cannot see. The 36 points are the least interesting number on the page.