Brandon Saad

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

19 goals and 18 assists in 71 games — 37 points — at 16:39 a night. Minus-8, 127 shots at 14.3 per cent, two on the power play, two shorthanded, 12 penalty minutes.

46.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 964 minutes, the 25th percentile, with his ice at 41-47 against an expectation of 37.58-42.48.

He started 45.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 28th percentile — the hardest deployment of any St. Louis forward who played nine hundred minutes.

The Finesse Game

127 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 51 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 6 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 64 shots on goal and nine goals — 14.06 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 50 shots and seven goals, 14.00 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: ten shots and one goal.

Below the rate from close and above it from the mid-slot, on a hundred and twenty-four shots on goal. A 15.0 per cent shooting percentage against a career 12.4 across 781 games.

167 tracked attempts, only five of them slap shots. 29 are backhands — a 17.4 per cent share, the third-highest in the league — and 22 are tip-ins.

That combination is the shot chart of a forward who plays with his back to the net and finishes what he retrieves, which at 6-1 and 207 pounds is exactly the game he has always played.

87.5 mph at the 26th percentile. The shot has never been hard and it has produced 227 goals.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 207 pounds, with 12 penalty minutes in 71 games and 142 in 781 career games — a remarkably clean record for a forward who plays this way.

Top speed 22.2 mph at the 45th percentile, 1.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 70th, 2.58 miles a game at the 52nd. He sprints often on modest ground covered, which at sixteen minutes a night is a forechecker’s line.

He forechecks first man and finishes the check, and the two shorthanded goals last season and nine for a career come from the same source: he pressures the puck and leaves with it.

He wins the wall at 207 pounds and does not need to hit anybody to do it — the strength is used to hold position rather than to punish.

The Intangibles

Forty-third overall in 2011, the second round, twelve seasons, 781 games, 457 points across Chicago, Columbus, Colorado and St. Louis, and two Stanley Cups in Chicago at twenty and twenty-two.

227 goals and a plus-55. He has scored between 17 and 24 goals in eight of twelve seasons, which is a stranger kind of consistency than it sounds.

He is thirty, on a roster sold off at the deadline, and 19 goals with the hardest forward deployment is the season a club should have expected.

What this file records is one of the least-discussed useful careers in the league: a two-time champion at twenty-two who has scored twenty goals a year for a decade and never once been the story.