Brandon Tanev

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

30 games, 9 goals and 6 assists at 14:34 a night, plus-4, thirteen penalty minutes, 51 shots. Undrafted, and 325 NHL games and 107 points across seven seasons out of it.

Thirty games is well short of the forty this book requires before it will place a man in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Finesse Game

Fifty-six per cent of his fifty-one shots came from inside twenty feet, at an 18-foot median. That is the closest median distance of any Seattle forward and one of the closest in the book — he shoots from the crease and nowhere else.

Nine goals from fifty-one shots is 17.6 per cent, which over thirty games is not a rate so much as a run. His career figure is fifty-one goals from 453 shots — 11.3 per cent — so this is well above his own norm on a fifth of a season.

38.7 per cent of his even-strength ice was spent in the offensive zone, the 7th percentile of the 568 skaters the tracking covers with forty games. That is the hardest deployment of any Seattle forward and it is not close.

50.6 per cent of the expected goals across 381 five-on-five minutes, out of that assignment, and his ice went 11-13 against an expectation of 12.72-12.43. Both numbers are drawn from a third of a season and neither can carry weight.

The Physical Game

Thirteen penalty minutes in thirty games at 6-0 and 189 pounds, and 138 across a 325-game career. He plays a heavy game at a size that does not suggest one.

The Intangibles

22.5 mph top speed and 2.3 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game, the second of which is the 89th percentile of the 568 skaters the tracking measures. A maximum scales with the number of shifts a man takes and he took thirty games’ worth, so the first figure understates him.

2.43 miles a game is the 39th percentile, which at 14:34 a night is the shift length rather than the skater.

Nine of his fifty-one career goals have come short-handed.

He is 30, undrafted, and has never scored more than fourteen in a season. The chair, the shot chart, the sprints and the short-handed goals are four real things. Thirty games is not a season and a 17.6 per cent conversion against a career 11.3 will not hold, so what the club has is the chair and the sprints.