Anze Kopitar

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

28 goals and 46 assists in all 82 games — 74 points — at thirty-five years old. Plus-20, 20:18 a night, 169 shots at 16.6 per cent, four penalty minutes.

Four penalty minutes in eighty-two games. Among every skater in the league who played seventy games at nineteen minutes or more, nobody took fewer. Two minor penalties in a season spent against the other club’s best centre.

74 points is his best figure since 2017-18 and it came at thirty-five on 169 shots, forty-one fewer than the season before. He is scoring more on less.

54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 81st percentile, with his ice at 60-43 against an expectation of 53.19-44.93.

Seventeen seasons, 1,292 games, 1,141 points, all of them in Los Angeles.

The Finesse Game

169 shots at a median of 22 feet, 44 per cent from inside twenty and 17 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 29 shots on goal, 2 goals. Inside forty: 138 shots, 26 goals, 18.84 per cent.

16.6 per cent is the second-highest full-season conversion rate of his career, behind the 17.5 per cent of his 92-point year in 2017-18, and it arrived at thirty-five on the lowest shot volume of his prime. That is not a repeatable combination and this book expects the goals to fall.

25 backhands, 18 tip-ins and 6 pokes in the tracked types — an unusually varied mix, and the signature of a player who scores from wherever the puck happens to be rather than from a spot he has practised.

96.0 mph at the 83rd percentile, on twenty slap shots.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 225, and four penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.2 mph, the 44th percentile; bursts 0.3 a game, the 15th; 3.20 miles a game, the 91st.

He covers a great deal of ground and almost never accelerates, which at thirty-five is exactly what it sounds like and is also what he looked like at twenty-eight. The game has never been played at speed here.

At 225 pounds he protects the puck below the goal line better than anyone on this roster, and the four penalty minutes are the other half of the same skill: he does not need to hook anyone because he does not get beaten to position.

The Intangibles

Eleventh overall in 2005 out of Slovenia, two Stanley Cups, two Selke Trophies, and the captaincy since 2016.

48.2 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 38th percentile; Danault’s figure is 47.0. Both centres start more shifts in their own end than in the attacking one, which is a large part of why Los Angeles conceded the second-fewest expected goals per sixty in the league.

He turns thirty-six in this edition’s season. A 74-point year at that age is a gift and not a baseline, and the two men the club has lined up behind him — Byfield, taken second overall in 2020, and Dubois, acquired at twenty-five — are both here for that reason.