Anze Kopitar

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

19 goals and 48 assists in 81 games at 35, 20:46 a night, the 97th percentile among forwards, and a minus-6 on a club that scored 239 and allowed 236.

1,210 games and 1,067 points, every one of them a King — the fifth-largest of both totals among the 723 men in this book. The goal column is the part that has moved: in a season he played out, only the sixteen of 2014-15 and the twelve of 2016-17 sit below nineteen. The assists did not move at all. Forty-eight is the twelfth time in sixteen years he has reached forty.

The Finesse Game

2.07 even-strength points per 60 is the 67th percentile — ordinary, and the honest description of where the scoring rate has gone. A third of his points came on the power play, the 84th percentile, off 3:20 a night with the extra man.

9.0 per cent on 210 shots is the 29th percentile, and 44 per cent of them came from the slot at a 27-foot median. He is not shooting his way to sixty-seven points.

53.7 per cent of the expected goals and 54.9 per cent of the attempts, the 77th and 84th percentiles. His ice went 46-52 against an expectation of 55.61-47.97 — a club story rather than his, because Los Angeles finished 32nd in the league in finishing at minus-26.9 goals.

The pair file is the report. He and Adrian Kempe took 52.5 per cent across 1,557 attempts, the most-used forward pair on the club — and apart, Kopitar was at 56.7 and Kempe at 47.3. Dustin Brown reads the same way: 51.2 together, 55.0 for Kopitar alone, 46.7 for Brown alone. Nobody here made him better and he made most of them better, which at 35 is a stranger finding than sixty-seven points.

The Physical Game

2.57 hits per 60 is the 30th percentile and 2.53 blocks the 83rd. He is not heavy to play against and never was; the value is in what he does not concede.

1.07 giveaways per 60 is the 21st percentile and 0.25 penalties taken per 60 is the 6th, and fourteen penalty minutes in eighty-one games is the whole ledger. He has killed penalties for as long as he has played first-line minutes, and 1:42 a night is the 80th percentile.

The Intangibles

21.7 mph is the 12th percentile of forwards and 1.7 bursts over 20 mph per 60 is the 7th — and 10.06 miles per 60 is the 85th. He is never fast and he never stops. That combination is what a first-line centre looks like at 35 when it works, and the chips have now found it under several of them.

Fifth in career points and fifth in career games in a book of 723, still taking the hardest assignment on a playoff club. What nothing here measures is where he is standing before the puck arrives, which is the part sixteen years of this club has been built around.