Calle Jarnkrok

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

20 goals and 19 assists in 73 games — 39 points — at 14:23 a night. Plus-9, 106 shots at 18.9 per cent, three on the power play, one shorthanded, 14 penalty minutes.

20 goals and 39 points are both career highs, in his tenth season, at thirty-one.

52.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 847 minutes, the 66th percentile, with his ice at 40-32 against an expectation of 35.69-32.31 — four more goals than the chances called for at the good end and exactly the expectation at the other.

He started 46.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 32nd percentile: 234 attacking draws against 266 defensive ones. The harder half of the starts, spent mostly on the second line beside Mitch Marner and John Tavares.

The Finesse Game

106 shots at a median of 24 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 48 shots on goal and 13 goals — 27.08 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 34 shots and seven goals, 20.59 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 23 shots and no goals.

Nearly double the positional rate from both bands that matter, on eighty-two shots on goal. That is the season, and it is also the warning.

A career 12.5 per cent across 647 games and 1,012 shots. Last season was 18.9. On 106 shots the difference between those two rates is about seven goals — which is to say a twenty-goal season and a thirteen-goal one, and the record says the second is the true one.

153 tracked attempts, 97 of them wrist shots and 20 tip-ins, a 13.1 per cent share. 92.4 mph at the 62nd percentile.

Nine shorthanded goals in a career is a real number for a man with 126 of them, and it says where he is trusted.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 193 pounds, with 14 penalty minutes in 73 games and 133 in 647 career games — very low for a forward who plays against other clubs’ good lines.

Top speed 22.4 mph at the 54th percentile, 1.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 70th, 2.20 miles a game at the 24th percentile.

That last figure is the odd one: he gets up to speed as often as a middle-six forward should and covers less ground than almost any of them. Fourteen minutes a night is most of the explanation, and the rest is a man who does not chase.

He is defensively responsible and can be put anywhere in a line-up, which across ten seasons and four clubs is the reason he keeps being signed.

He is not physical, does not hit, and does not need to. The value is in never being the reason a shift goes wrong.

The Intangibles

Fifty-first overall in 2010, the second round, ten seasons, 647 games, 280 points across Nashville, Seattle, Calgary and Toronto.

126 goals and 154 assists, and a plus-54.

He is thirty-two, on a club that finished fourth in the league.

What the file describes is a genuinely useful third-line forward who had the best shooting season of his life at thirty-one. The role will hold. The 18.9 per cent will not.