Brandon Tanev

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 19 assists in 82 games — 35 points — at 14:13 a night. Plus-21, 115 shots at 13.9 per cent, one shorthanded, three game-winners, 44 penalty minutes.

Sixteen goals and 35 points are both career highs, in his eighth season and at thirty-one.

53 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 941 minutes, the 71st percentile, with his ice at 40-29 against an expectation of 36.16-32.07.

He started 51.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 54th percentile — a neutral third-line assignment on a club that had no bad ones to give out.

The Finesse Game

115 shots at a median of 17 feet, with 55 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 12 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 63 shots on goal and ten goals — 15.87 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 24 shots and four goals, 16.67 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 18 shots and two goals, 11.11.

On 105 shots on goal that reads as a good season rather than a good finisher: a 13.9 per cent shooting percentage against a career 11.8.

166 tracked attempts, three of them slap shots and 24 tip-ins. 85.4 mph at the 13th percentile — one of the softest shots on this roster.

The goals come from arriving. He is at the net before the defenceman has turned, and the volume from seventeen feet is the record of that rather than of any shooting skill.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 189 pounds, and this is where the file lives.

2.0 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 85th percentile, at a top speed of 22.8 mph, the 77th, on 2.40 miles a game at the 37th. He sprints constantly in fourteen minutes of ice time.

He forechecks first man at full speed and finishes every check available to him, which is the single most recognisable thing about him and the reason he has played 407 NHL games without ever being drafted.

44 penalty minutes in 82 games and 182 in 407 career games — a modest rate for a forward who plays this way, which says the contact is legal and constant rather than reckless.

Ten career shorthanded goals in 407 games is a remarkable number for a bottom-six winger and comes directly from the same thing: he pressures the puck at the blue line and leaves with it.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, eight seasons, 407 games, 142 points across Winnipeg, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

67 goals and a plus-52. He reached the NHL at twenty-four, has never played more than 82 games in a season, and has had exactly one season above 30 points — this one.

He is thirty-one. What a club gets is the same thing every year: fourteen minutes, a full-speed forecheck, a penalty kill, and between eight and sixteen goals.

On a club that finished twelfth in the league and third in expected goals against, the third line did as much of that as anybody, and this is the man on it whose name gets said out loud.