Brad Marchand

Last Season

Twenty-seven goals and 27 assists in 52 games — 54 points, minus-16, at 17:44 a night. His seventeenth NHL season, and his 1,034th career point.

The Finesse Game

Twenty-seven goals in 52 games at 37 years old is the headline and the release is why: 213 unblocked attempts, 28 goals, median distance 28 feet with 38 per cent from inside twenty.

He shoots from further out than the men around him and converts at a higher rate, which is what a genuinely elite shot buys you when the legs start to go. The hands in tight have not moved at all.

The Physical Game

Five foot nine and 180 pounds, and one of the most physically irritating players of the past two decades. Thirty-eight penalty minutes in 52 games, and every one of them chosen.

He is not strong. He is relentless, and he has spent seventeen seasons making men who outweigh him by fifty pounds lose their tempers.

The Intangibles

The five-on-five numbers were the weakest of his career — 47.8 per cent of the expected goals, 34th percentile, in 633 minutes — and he is 38 in May.

Four hundred and fifty-one goals, 1,034 points, a Stanley Cup in Boston and another in Florida, and a third-round pick in 2006 who was told his whole life he was too small.

Six points in his last ten. The end is somewhere in the next two seasons and nobody is going to see it coming until it has happened.