Bo Horvat

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

38 goals and 32 assists in 79 games — 70 points — split between Vancouver and the Islanders, at 20:40 a night. Minus-1, 229 shots at 16.6 per cent, twelve on the power play, four shorthanded, five game-winners.

Thirty-eight goals is a career high by seven and the twelve power-play goals are a career high too.

48.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 40th percentile, with his ice at 54-55 against an expectation of 49.8-52.5.

He started 49.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 44th percentile — near-neutral deployment, and a below-average share out of it. That is the argument the goal total does not answer.

Nine seasons, 651 games, 436 points, and a career minus-69.

The Finesse Game

229 shots at a median of 21 feet, and a distance chart that runs against the ordinary shape.

Inside twenty: 103 shots on goal and 18 goals, 17.48 per cent. Twenty to forty: 101 shots and 18 goals — 17.82 per cent, against a league forward rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 26 shots and 3 goals.

He converts from mid-range at a higher rate than from the crease, and better than half again what the league manages from there. Almost nobody does that. What it means in practice is that the shot is genuinely dangerous from the top of the circle, and it is why the power-play total moved.

141 wrist shots and 53 snap out of 301 tracked attempts, with 50 tip-ins and only 15 slap. 90.3 mph at the 45th percentile.

The four shorthanded goals come from the same place: he reads the pass, breaks flat, and shoots from where he catches it.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 225, with 18 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.9 mph, the 82nd percentile; 2.6 bursts a game, the 93rd; 3.23 miles a game, the 93rd. Near the top of the league in both the number of sprints and the ground covered, at twenty-eight and 225 pounds.

That is a heavy centre who skates like a light one, and it is the reason he can play twenty minutes against the other club’s best and still be first on the forecheck.

He finishes checks, protects the puck below the goal line and is difficult to knock off it. What he does not do is defend well positionally, and a career minus-69 across nine seasons on three different kinds of club is not entirely the fault of the clubs.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2013 to Vancouver, eight and a half seasons there, and a trade in his contract year that ended them.

208 goals in 651 games at a rate that has climbed every year of the last four.

He is twenty-eight, signed long, and the club has decided he is the first-line centre. The file says that is right about the scoring and unresolved about everything else: a 48.7 per cent chance share from neutral zone starts is not a first-line centre’s number, and it has been roughly that number for nine seasons.