Anthony Duclair

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

2 goals and 7 assists in 20 games — 9 points — at 14:51 a night for Florida. Plus-4, 43 shots at 4.7 per cent, 2 penalty minutes.

Twenty games is the shortest season of a nine-year career, and it followed the best one: 31 goals and 58 points in 2021-22.

50.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 264 minutes, the 52nd percentile, with his ice at 14-10 against an expectation of 14.90-14.50.

He started 54.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 68th percentile.

Two hundred and sixty-four minutes is a fortnight of a regular’s season and nothing in it should be read as a finding.

The Finesse Game

43 shots at a median of 22 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 19 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: 12 shots and one goal. Beyond forty: 11 shots and one goal.

Nineteen shots on goal from inside twenty feet without scoring is the kind of run that happens to good finishers over twenty games. His career shooting percentage is 13.2 and he scored on 18.6 per cent of his shots in 2021-22.

66 tracked attempts, ten of them tip-ins and four slap. 86.1 mph at the 16th percentile — a soft shot on a winger who has scored twenty or more three times.

The shot has never been the weapon; the entry is. He arrives at the offensive blue line with speed and the puck, and the shot comes from the space that creates rather than from beating a goaltender cleanly.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 198 pounds, and the skating is the asset: 1.9 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 83rd percentile, a top speed of 22.4 mph at the 59th, and 2.35 miles a game at the 35th on fifteen minutes a night.

That combination — a high burst count on modest ground covered — is the tracking line of a winger whose game is repeated acceleration in short bursts rather than sustained work.

He carries the puck through the neutral zone, which is the single skill the club is paying for and the one that does not decline before thirty.

2 penalty minutes in 20 games and 165 in 490 career games. He is not a physical player, is not asked to be, and does very little once the puck has gone the other way.

The Intangibles

Eightieth overall in 2013, the third round, nine seasons, 490 games, 261 points across six clubs.

122 goals, and the file has been the same at all six addresses: two or three good months, a stretch of nothing, and a trade. The 31 goals in 2021-22 is the exception and it came at twenty-six.

He is twenty-eight, joining a rebuilding club on a short deal, and the transaction is transparent: if he scores twenty by February somebody will pay for him.

What this book can say is that the skating is real, the finishing record over 490 games is a 13.2 per cent shooting percentage, and the twenty games above tell you nothing.