Alexander Wennberg

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 25 assists in 82 games — 38 points — at 18:42 a night. Minus-7, 101 shots at 12.9 per cent, four on the power play, three game-winners, 20 penalty minutes.

50.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,125 minutes, the 50th percentile, with his ice at 43-48 against an expectation of 42.48-41.59 — exactly the goals the chances predicted at the good end and six more than they predicted at the other, which on a club that beat its chances by forty makes his the second-worst forward record on the roster.

He started 50.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 49th percentile, which on this roster is the neutral second-line assignment.

The Finesse Game

101 shots at a median of 14 feet — the eighth-shortest of any skater in this book who took eighty attempts, and the shortest of any centre on this roster.

Inside twenty feet: 57 shots on goal and 12 goals — 21.05 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 29 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: nine shots and none.

Every goal he scored came from inside twenty feet, and thirty-eight shots on goal from outside it produced nothing at all. That is not a slump; it is what the whole file looks like.

136 tracked attempts, and exactly one of them is a slap shot. 29 are tip-ins, a 21.3 per cent share. 85.9 mph at the 16th percentile.

So: a 6-2 centre with a soft shot who never takes one from distance, gets to fourteen feet, and converts above the league rate when he arrives. The 25 assists are the larger half of the file and come from the same place — he plays below the dots and finds the man at the far post.

81 goals and 224 assists in 633 career games is the shape of it: the shooting has never been the job.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 190 pounds, with 20 penalty minutes in 82 games and 141 in 633 career games — a very clean record for a centre.

Top speed 22.0 mph at the 37th percentile, 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 60th, 2.78 miles a game at the 67th. Ordinary in every direction and appropriate to the role.

He is defensively responsible and takes the draws against the other club’s centre when the matchup demands it, which is most of why an ordinary scoring record buys him nearly nineteen minutes a night.

At 190 pounds he does not win battles on strength and does not try to. The work is positional: stick in the lane, body between the puck and the net.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2013, nine seasons, 633 games, 305 points across Columbus, Florida and Seattle.

The 59-point season in Columbus in 2016-17 at twenty-two is the one the career has been measured against, and the four seasons after it produced 35, 25, 22 and 29.

He is twenty-nine, and the file has settled into something useful and unspectacular: a second-line centre who takes the hard draws, plays eighteen minutes, and scores a dozen goals from fourteen feet.

The minus-7 on a club that outscored its chances by forty is the one number that should give a reader pause, and it belongs in this file rather than in anybody else’s on the roster.