Artem Zub

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

3 goals and 7 assists in 53 games — 10 points — at 20:15 a night. Plus-2, 41 shots, 39 penalty minutes.

50.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 58th percentile, with his ice at 35-34 against an expectation of 37.83-36.48 across 952 minutes — the goals arrived where the chances said, which on this club is rare.

He started 44.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 25th percentile: 265 attacking draws against 332. A chance share above fifty out of the hardest deployment on the blue line is the best defensive line in this chapter.

Three seasons, 181 games, 46 points, and he was never drafted.

The Finesse Game

41 shots at a median of 47 feet, and three goals.

Beyond forty: 25 shots on goal and none. Inside twenty: four shots and one goal.

Forty-one shots in fifty-three games is a defenceman who does not shoot, and 12 goals in 181 career games says nothing has ever suggested he should.

43 wrist shots and 13 slap out of 63 tracked attempts. 97.1 mph at the 88th percentile, on thirteen slap shots, so the shot itself is hard and almost never used.

34 career assists. The first pass is short, safe and to the correct man, which given the skating behind it is the only available option.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 201, with 39 penalty minutes.

Top speed 20.7 mph — the 1st percentile of the 574 skaters in this book who played forty games, and the eighth-slowest reading in the league. 0.2 bursts a game, the 6th percentile; 2.82 miles a game, the 68th.

At the very bottom of the league in outright speed and above it in ground covered, playing twenty minutes a night against the hard end of the rink. That combination should not work and the chance share says it does.

The way it works is position. He is never beaten wide because he never gives up the inside, closes with his stick and his angle, and takes the man rather than the puck.

He blocks shots and clears his crease at 201 pounds. There is no margin at all if the reads go, because there is nothing underneath them.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Khabarovsk, and a first North American season at twenty-five after seven years in Russia.

181 games and 46 points across three seasons, all of them here, on a club that has not made the playoffs in any of them.

He is twenty-eight. The measurements say the eighth-slowest skater in the book’s forty-game population is holding a top-four job on merit, which is worth stating plainly because almost nothing else in this book does.