Brayden Point

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

66 games, 28 goals and 30 assists at 19:28 a night, minus-5, thirty-three penalty minutes, 176 shots. Ten of the twenty-eight came on the power play. Seventy-ninth overall in 2014 by Tampa Bay — the third round — six seasons, 417 games and 368 points.

The Finesse Game

Seventy-two and a half per cent of his attempts came from the slot — the 6th-highest share of all 393 forwards — off an 18-foot median.

Only five men in the league shoot from closer in and none of them scored twenty-eight goals in sixty-six games.

8.22 shots per 60 is the 65th percentile at 15.9 per cent, and thirty-eight per cent of his points came on the power play, the 94th percentile, off 3:36 a night at the 96th.

2.07 even-strength points per 60 is the 67th percentile, which is the one ordinary number in the file and the one worth holding onto: at five-on-five he is a good top-six centre rather than a great one, and the power play is doing a great deal of the work.

51.7 per cent of the expected goals is the 65th percentile, out of 58.3 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 89th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 177 pounds — one of the smallest forwards in the league — and 3.50 hits per 60 at the 45th percentile, which for that size is more contact than the frame suggests.

Thirty-three penalty minutes in sixty-six games, and 0.56 penalties taken per 60 at the 39th percentile.

The Intangibles

16.6 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 is the 10th-most of the 365 forwards the tracking covers, against a 23.4 mph top speed at the 93rd percentile.

Fast, and above twenty miles an hour more often than nine forwards in ten. That combination, at 177 pounds, is the whole shape of the player — he arrives at the net front by beating people to it rather than by standing there.

His shot is 85.4 mph, the 18th percentile, which is the trade: he scores from eighteen feet because he cannot score from thirty.

He is 26, with 368 points in 417 games. The speed, the slot share and a scoring rate of 0.88 a game are the case. He has played eighty games once in six seasons, and a 5-11, 177-pound forward who gets above twenty miles an hour sixteen times an hour is going to keep collecting the reasons why.