Alexis Lafrenière

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

16 goals and 23 assists in 81 games — 39 points — at 15:13 a night. Plus-10, 135 shots at 11.9 per cent, three on the power play, 33 penalty minutes.

49 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 43rd percentile, with his ice at 50-45 against an expectation of 44.06-45.82 across 1,110 minutes.

And the deployment has to go with it. He started 59.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 89th percentile: 307 attacking draws against 209. A chance share below fifty out of the top eleven per cent of zone starts is the least encouraging line on this roster.

Three seasons, 216 games, 91 points.

The Finesse Game

135 shots at a median of 23 feet, and sixteen goals.

Inside twenty feet: 60 shots on goal and 14 goals — 23.33 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 40 shots and 2 goals, 5.00 per cent. Beyond forty: 33 shots and 1 goal.

Fourteen of sixteen goals from inside twenty, at a rate a third better than the league’s. The finishing from close is real and it is the one thing in the file that has clearly arrived.

37 tip-ins out of 183 tracked attempts — a fifth of everything he throws, which for a twenty-one-year-old is an unusual and useful habit: it means he is standing where he will be hit.

95 wrist shots and three slap. 87.2 mph at the 24th percentile, on three slap shots, so there is nothing in the number.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 191, with 33 penalty minutes.

Top speed 21.8 mph, the 26th percentile; 0.9 bursts a game, the 48th; 2.44 miles a game, the 40th.

Below the league in speed and at it in everything else, from a first overall pick of twenty-one. That is the number the whole projection turns on, because a winger who is not fast and does not carry has to arrive somewhere useful instead.

He does go to the net and does take the punishment for it, and the tip-in count is the evidence. He wins pucks on the wall at 191 pounds better than the frame suggests.

What he does not do is drive a shift. The 43rd-percentile chance share out of the 89th percentile of zone starts is that sentence in numbers.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2020, and 91 points in 216 games across three seasons.

The progression reads 21 points, 31 and 39, on ice time that has moved from thirteen minutes to fifteen.

He is twenty-one, which is early enough that none of this is a verdict. What the file says plainly is that the close-range finishing is a genuine NHL skill and that everything around it — the skating, the chance share, the deployment the club still needs to give him — is not yet a top-six forward’s.