Anthony Mantha

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

11 goals and 16 assists in 67 games — 27 points — at 14:13 a night. Minus-8, 119 shots at 9.2 per cent, one on the power play, 31 penalty minutes.

52.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 880 minutes, the 69th percentile — the best of any forward on this roster who played more than eight hundred minutes — with his ice at 35-40 against an expectation of 37.23-33.30. Seven more goals allowed than the chances called for and two fewer scored.

He started 49 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 41st percentile: 220 attacking draws against 229 defensive ones. Even, on the third line, and a 69th-percentile chance share out of it.

The Finesse Game

119 shots at a median of 23 feet, with 41 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 13 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 50 shots on goal and seven goals — 14.00 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 49 shots and four goals, 8.16 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 20 shots and none.

Below the positional rate at every distance, on a hundred and nineteen shots on goal, from a man with a career 11.7 per cent across 420 games. On 119 shots that difference is about three goals, so most of the drop was the season rather than a decline.

156 tracked attempts, 68 of them wrist shots and 43 snap shots — a 27.6 per cent share, which is very high — and nine slap. 92.0 mph at the 60th percentile.

119 goals in 420 career games. The shot has always been the asset and the volume has never quite arrived: a hundred and nineteen shots in sixty-seven games is a bottom-six rate from a man who was drafted twentieth overall to score.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 240 pounds — one of the heaviest forwards in this book — with 31 penalty minutes in 67 games and 241 in 420 career games.

A top speed of 23.0 mph at the 85th percentile and 1.8 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 81st, on 2.24 miles a game at the 27th, which is fourteen minutes of ice time.

He is genuinely fast for his size and that has never been the criticism.

The criticism is that he does not use it, and this book cannot measure engagement directly. What it can say is that a 240-pound forward with 85th-percentile speed took a hundred and nineteen shots and 31 penalty minutes, which is not the line of a man playing to his body.

He does not forecheck hard and does not finish checks, and at that size in a bottom-six role it is the whole of the case against him.

The Intangibles

Twentieth overall in 2013, eight seasons, 420 games, 252 points across Detroit and Washington.

119 goals and 133 assists, and a minus-30.

He is twenty-nine, on his second club, having been traded once for two forwards and a first-round pick.

A twentieth-overall pick at six foot five with 85th-percentile speed and a career 11.7 per cent shooting rate should be more than a twenty-seven-point third-liner, and he has been that for four seasons. The 69th-percentile chance share is the good news, and it came in eight hundred and eighty minutes of soft opposition.