Andrei Kuzmenko

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

39 goals and 35 assists in 81 games — 74 points — at 16:15 a night, in his first NHL season, at twenty-six. Plus-9, 143 shots at 27.3 per cent, fourteen on the power play, 8 penalty minutes.

That 27.3 per cent is the highest shooting percentage of the 350 skaters in this book who took a hundred or more shots. Nobody is close: Brayden Point is second at 21.7.

52.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,040 minutes, the 70th percentile, with his ice at 63-47 against an expectation of 45.20-40.26 — eighteen more goals than the chances called for at the good end.

He started 54.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 68th percentile.

Eight penalty minutes in eighty-one games.

The Finesse Game

143 shots at a median of 15 feet, with 63 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 11 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 98 shots on goal and 36 goals — 36.73 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. That is the highest close-range conversion of the 270 forwards in this book with forty or more shots on goal from inside twenty feet. From twenty to forty: 29 shots and five goals, 17.24 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 17 shots and two goals.

Thirty-six goals from ninety-eight slot shots is more than double what the league gets, and it is the entire season.

210 tracked attempts, 51 of them tip-ins — a 24.3 per cent share, the fifth-highest of the 477 skaters in this book with a hundred attempts — and seven slap shots in a year. 91.6 mph at the 56th percentile.

He plays in the paint and he redirects. The 15-foot median, the tip-in share and the fourteen power-play goals are three descriptions of the same job: standing where the shot arrives and getting a stick on it.

And there is no getting round the caution. A 36.73 per cent rate on ninety-eight shots is the most extreme finishing season in this edition, and the honest projection for a man of twenty-seven is that it comes most of the way back. What survives is the position he takes and the volume he gets from it, which is real skill; the conversion is not going to hold.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 200 pounds, with 8 penalty minutes in 81 games.

A top speed of 21.2 mph, the 6th percentile, and 0.1 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 3rd percentile. He covers 2.41 miles a game, the 37th.

That is one of the slowest tracking lines of any regular forward in this book, and it is not an artefact of ice time: he played sixteen minutes a night for eighty-one games and reached twenty miles an hour about once every ten games.

He is slow, and everything he does well is done standing in one place.

He is not physical and does not need to be, but at 5-11 in the blue paint against defencemen the position is going to be contested harder than it was last season once the league has seen the tape.

He goes to the net and stays there, which is a form of courage that the penalty column will never record.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, one season, 81 games, 74 points, all of them here.

39 goals and 35 assists, and a plus-9.

He is twenty-seven, a Russian winger who came over at twenty-six after a career at home, and scored thirty-nine goals in his first NHL season, a total only nineteen men in the league beat.

An undrafted twenty-six-year-old rookie with a thirty-nine-goal season is one of the strangest files in this book. What it does not settle is any of the things a projection needs: there is one season of evidence, it is the most extreme finishing season in the edition, and the tracking says he is among the slowest forwards in the league. The next hundred games will decide which of those mattered.