Bryan Rust

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

60 games, 24 goals and 34 assists at 18:46 a night, plus-7, fourteen penalty minutes, 180 shots. Nine of the twenty-four came on the power play. Eightieth overall in 2010 — the third round — eight seasons, 424 games, 270 points.

The Finesse Game

2.54 even-strength points per 60 is the 83rd percentile among forwards and 9.59 shots per 60 is the 85th at 13.3 per cent.

Fifty-eight per cent of his attempts came from the slot at a 22-foot median, the 75th percentile among forwards.

Three minutes and twenty-six seconds of power play a night is the 94th percentile — the fourth-largest man-advantage shift on a club that finished 3rd in the league in power-play rate, behind Evgeni Malkin, Jake Guentzel and Kris Letang.

1.17 takeaways per 60 is the 18th percentile against 1.92 giveaways at the 73rd, which is the one soft column.

50.7 per cent of the expected goals and 51.1 per cent of the attempts — modest figures on a club that took 53.5 per cent of the chances — out of 59.6 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 58th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.

The pair file explains part of it. With Sidney Crosby across 1,147 attempts the two took 51.0 per cent; Crosby apart from Rust is at 59.3 across 1,000 attempts. That is an eight-point gap in the wrong direction and the largest drop in Crosby’s pair file — none of his other five recorded team-mates cost him more than four and a half.

The Physical Game

2.29 hits per 60 is the 25th percentile and 1.28 blocks the 28th at 5-11 and 202 pounds. 0.53 penalties drawn per 60 against 0.37 taken, and fourteen penalty minutes in sixty games is a very clean year.

The Intangibles

22.4 mph is the 47th percentile, 7.0 bursts per 60 the 70th, and 9.33 miles per 60 the 24th — the last of those is a genuinely low figure for a top-six winger.

The 87.5 mph shot is the 30th percentile. Like Guentzel he scores from twenty-two feet rather than from velocity.

He is 30, has played sixty, fifty-six and fifty-five games in the last three seasons, and has cleared seventy once, in 2018-19. Fifty-eight points in sixty games is a seventy-nine-point pace, and the fifty-six he took from fifty-five games in 2019-20 is a fraction better still. The possession share underneath it and the with-and-without gap against Crosby are the two reasons to hold the enthusiasm.