Blake Wheeler

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

16 goals and 39 assists in 72 games — 55 points — for Winnipeg, at 17:03 a night. Minus-3, 126 shots at 12.7 per cent, seven on the power play, six game-winners, 46 penalty minutes.

52.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 70th percentile, with his ice at 43-35 against an expectation of 42.73-38.69 across 965 minutes.

He started 59.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 88th percentile: 361 attacking draws against 249.

Fifteen seasons, 1,118 games, 922 points, 741 penalty minutes. Nobody else in this chapter has played a thousand games.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 25 feet, and sixteen goals.

Inside twenty feet: 50 shots on goal and 12 goals — 24.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71, at thirty-six. From twenty to forty: 47 shots and 3 goals. Beyond forty: 26 shots and 1 goal.

The close-range finishing has not gone anywhere, and on fifty shots that is a real number rather than a fluctuation.

101 wrist shots out of 198 tracked attempts, with 29 tip-ins and 14 deflections — forty-three redirects in all, which is a great deal for a winger of his size and says he is still going to the front. 96.7 mph at the 87th percentile, on 21 slap shots.

610 career assists against 312 goals. He has been a distributor from the wall for fifteen years and the 39 assists say he still is.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 222 pounds, with 46 penalty minutes.

2.0 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 85th percentile — at thirty-six. Top speed 22.5 mph, the 59th; 2.62 miles a game, the 54th.

The top speed has gone and the willingness has not. A 6-5 winger in his sixteenth season still reaching for full speed twice a game is the tracking’s version of a compliment.

He protects the puck on the wall with his frame, wins the battles he chooses, and does not chase the ones he cannot.

What is missing at thirty-six is the second effort. He is a step late on the backcheck and the club will have to hide him from the hard matchups, which is what the 88th-percentile zone starts already say Winnipeg was doing.

The Intangibles

Fifth overall in 2004 to Phoenix, who never signed him; then Boston, then Atlanta, then Winnipeg for twelve seasons and the captaincy, and now here.

312 goals, 610 assists, 922 points in 1,118 games. The four straight seasons of 74 points or better between 2015 and 2019 are the peak, and 55 in 72 games is a long way down from it and still useful.

He is thirty-seven this season. The file is a third-line winger with a first-line passing record and a body that has fifteen years on it, and the club is buying the middle of a decline rather than the top of one.