Brayden Point

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

51 goals and 44 assists in 82 games — 95 points — at 19:40 a night. Plus-2, 235 shots at 21.7 per cent, twenty on the power play, nine game-winners, and 7 penalty minutes.

Fifty-one goals is a career high by ten and twenty of them came on the man advantage.

54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,217 minutes, the 79th percentile, with his ice at 74-60 against an expectation of 65.09-55.01.

He started 62.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 95th percentile.

And Tampa Bay as a club is the reason this chapter reads differently from the three before it. Its skaters scored 175 five-on-five goals against an expectation of 175.8 and conceded 162 against an expectation of 164.8. Nothing here needs explaining away.

The Finesse Game

235 shots at a median of 17 feet, with 62 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 3 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 137 shots on goal and 38 goals — 27.74 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 85 shots and 14 goals, 16.47 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: ten shots and none.

Half again the rate from close and half again from the mid-slot, on two hundred and twenty-two shots on goal from inside forty feet. A 21.7 per cent shooting percentage is the highest of the 144 forwards in this book who took a hundred and fifty shots, and it sits against a career figure of 18.0 across 499 games.

So the finishing is genuinely elite and last season was a good year inside it. The career 18.0 is the number to plan around; 21.7 is the number that happened.

320 tracked attempts and two of them are slap shots. Forty are tip-ins and 34 backhands. He does not shoot from distance, does not wind up, and generates almost the whole of his volume inside the goaltender’s reach.

87.5 mph at the 26th percentile. The shot is soft by measurement and it is the least relevant fact in this file.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 177 pounds, and the skating is the best in this book bar one: a top speed of 24.3 mph at the 100th percentile — behind only Ryan Poehling — with 6.1 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 99th, a figure only Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid exceed. He covers 3.28 miles a game at the 93rd.

That is a complete tracking line: fastest, most frequent and highest mileage, from a 177-pound centre. There is no other forward in this chapter within reach of it.

Seven penalty minutes in 82 games, and 128 in 499 for a career. He is not a physical player and at 177 pounds the game is played in space rather than through people.

The speed is what makes the seventeen-foot median possible. He arrives at the net before the defenceman has finished turning, and the 137 shots from inside twenty feet are the record of that rather than of any willingness to be hit.

The Intangibles

Seventy-ninth overall in 2014, the third round, seven seasons, 499 games, 463 points, all of them here, and two Stanley Cups.

218 goals at a career 18.0 per cent, and 41 or more in two of the last five seasons in a stretch that included two shortened ones.

He is twenty-seven. A third-round pick who is now one of the three or four best finishers in the league, on a club that has won two championships with him at the centre of it, is about as complete a file as this book contains.

The one caution is the shooting percentage. Nobody sustains 21.7, and a return to 18.0 on the same volume is a forty-two-goal season rather than a fifty-one-goal one.