Alexander Wennberg

Last Season

Eighteen goals and 37 assists in 80 games — 55 points, minus-25, at 20:27 a night with eight power-play goals and only eighteen penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

A career playmaker who has learned, at 31, where goals come from. Sixty-four per cent of his unblocked attempts came from inside twenty feet with a median of fifteen — the most extreme location profile of any forward on this roster and one of the closest in the league.

Eighteen goals from 126 attempts is a career high and it is the shot chart that did it.

Thirty-seven assists is the familiar part. Four hundred and twenty-five points in 869 career games.

The Physical Game

Six foot two, 190, and light for the frame. Eighteen penalty minutes in eighty games is very low.

He is a positional defensive centre rather than a physical one — good on draws, reliable on the kill, and not somebody who wins pucks by force.

The Intangibles

Forty-seven point six per cent of the expected goals, 33rd percentile, and 48 per cent of the shot attempts, 35th, across 1,141 minutes, with the goals 47-42 in his favour.

The minus-25 is not supported by any of that. San Jose’s goaltenders conceded twenty goals more than the chances they faced — the fourth-worst mark in the league — and a centre taking twenty minutes a night on a rebuilding club wears a great deal of it.

Ten points in his last ten, four of them goals. He is 31, a fourteenth overall pick, and this was one of the better seasons of his career hidden inside one of the worst plus-minus figures in the book.