Brock Nelson

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

36 goals and 39 assists in 82 games — 75 points — at 18:26 a night. Plus-13, 222 shots at 16.2 per cent, eight game-winners, 24 penalty minutes.

Seventy-five points at thirty-one, a career high in his tenth season.

50 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 52nd percentile — and his ice finished 71-45 against an expectation of 53.46-53.48.

Read that again. Seventeen and a half goals more than the chances deserved at the attacking end and eight and a half fewer than they deserved at the defensive. A dead-average chance share produced a twenty-six-goal margin. Some of the second half is Sorokin. The first half is finishing, his and his line’s, and it is the largest single swing on the roster.

He started 56.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 79th percentile.

Ten seasons, 758 games, 462 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

222 shots at a median of 26 feet, and the distance chart says something unusual.

Inside twenty: 88 shots on goal and 16 goals, 18.18 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. Twenty to forty: 98 shots and 13 goals, 13.27 per cent, against 11.05. Beyond forty: 33 shots and 6 goals — 18.18 per cent, against a league forward rate of 4.16.

That last figure is four times the league’s and it is six goals on thirty-three shots. This book will state it and then say plainly what it is: a sample that small returns five goals above expectation about as often as a coin lands heads five times, and nothing in his career rate supports it repeating.

What is real is the volume and the release. 156 wrist shots and 42 slap out of 298 tracked attempts, with 30 tip-ins. 92.3 mph at the 61st percentile.

39 assists is a career high too, and the 6-4 frame in the slot is what the second unit is built around.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 205, with 24 penalty minutes in eighty-two games.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 70th percentile; 1.8 bursts a game, the 82nd; 3.19 miles a game, the 90th.

High mileage and good speed at thirty-one, which for a centre playing eighteen minutes is the readout of a man who has not slowed down yet.

He is not a physical centre for his size and never has been — twenty-four penalty minutes in a full season from a 6-4 man is the tell. What he does with the frame is hold position in the slot and take the cross-check without moving, which is a different thing and is where sixteen of his goals came from.

The Intangibles

Thirtieth overall in 2010, and 758 games in one uniform.

He has scored twenty or more in seven of ten seasons and has never been the best forward on the team in any of them.

At thirty-one, with a career high in points, the honest projection is that the shooting percentage comes down and the volume does not. Sixteen per cent overall against a career rate near fourteen is about four goals of froth; take them off and the file is still a thirty-goal centre with the best goal differential on the club.