Auston Matthews

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

40 goals and 45 assists in 74 games — 85 points — at 20:17 a night. Plus-31, 327 shots at 12.2 per cent, thirteen on the power play, eight game-winners, 20 penalty minutes.

Forty goals in 74 games is a forty-four-goal pace, and it follows the 60 he scored in 2021-22.

58.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 95th percentile, across 1,161 minutes, with his ice at 75-37 against an expectation of 66.01-47.70. Nine goals more than the chances called for at the good end and ten fewer at the other.

He started 65.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 98th percentile: 463 attacking draws against 246 defensive ones.

The Finesse Game

327 shots at a median of 24 feet, and 453 tracked attempts — the fifth-highest count in the league.

Inside twenty feet: 139 shots on goal and 21 goals — 15.11 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 131 shots and 17 goals, 12.98 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 55 shots and four goals, 7.27, against a league rate of 4.16.

That first figure is the one worth stopping on. The best goal-scorer of his generation finished below the positional rate from close range, on the seventh-largest volume of close-range shots in the league, and scored forty goals anyway.

A 12.2 per cent shooting percentage against a career 15.7 across 481 games. On 327 shots that difference is about eleven goals — the gap between a forty-goal season and a fifty-one-goal one, and part of the reason a club that finished fourth in the league finished twenty-second in finishing.

So the honest reading is not that he declined. It is that the volume is the skill, the finishing rate is what varies, and last season the rate went the wrong way.

62 of those attempts are slap shots and 42 are tip-ins. 94.1 mph at the 72nd percentile — hard rather than exceptional, which surprises people.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 215 pounds, with 3.43 miles a game at the 96th percentile at a top speed of 22.4 mph, the 59th, and 1.9 bursts above twenty a game at the 84th.

Enormous ground covered from ordinary top-end speed, by a 215-pound centre playing twenty minutes. That is the tracking line of a man who never stops working inside a shift, and it is the least-discussed part of the file.

20 penalty minutes in 74 games and 94 in 481 for a career — an extremely low rate for a centre this size.

He is hard to move below the goal line and protects the puck with his back to pressure, which is where a good share of the 139 close-range shots come from.

He is not a punishing forward and has never needed to be: the size is used to hold position and to shield, not to finish checks.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2016, seven seasons, 481 games, 542 points, all of them here.

299 goals in 481 games at a career 15.7 per cent, with 60 in 2021-22 and a Hart Trophy for it.

He is twenty-six, on a club that has finished above a hundred points three years running and has not won a playoff round in most of them.

The file is close to unimpeachable and the one caution is a real one: his shooting percentage has run 14.3, 18.2, 14.7, 16.2, 18.5, 17.2 and 12.2. The last figure is the outlier and the 15.7 career rate is the expectation.