Casey Cizikas

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

6 goals and 15 assists in 81 games — 21 points — at 14:32 a night. Even in plus-minus, 111 shots at 5.4 per cent, 54 penalty minutes.

45.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 26th percentile, with his ice at 28-33 against an expectation of 32.77-38.77 across 989 minutes — nearly six goals better than the chances at the defensive end and five worse at the attacking.

And the deployment: 173 attacking-zone draws against 425 — 28.9 per cent, the 3rd percentile of this book. He is one of four Islanders forwards inside the bottom four percentiles of the league, and the other three are the men he plays with.

Twelve seasons, 745 games, 222 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

111 shots at a median of 21 feet, half of them from inside twenty, and six goals.

Inside twenty: 57 shots on goal and 4 goals, 7.02 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. Twenty to forty: 33 shots and 2 goals.

That is less than half the league’s conversion from the only place he shoots, and it is the file: 97 goals in 745 games.

And a curiosity worth flagging rather than reading. The measured shot speed is 98.0 mph, the 91st percentile, on three slap shots out of 149 tracked attempts. This book has established that the shot-speed figure is largely a slap-shot measurement — it correlates with slap count at about 0.6 and with everything else at 0.15 — so a reading this high from a man who almost never winds up is the exception rather than the rule, and there is no obvious way to tell from here whether it means anything.

83 wrist shots, 23 backhands and 18 tip-ins. Everything happens inside the dots and none of it goes in.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 191, with 54 penalty minutes and 364 in his career.

2.7 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 94th percentile, at thirty-two years old and fourteen minutes a night. Top speed 22.6 mph, the 66th; 2.44 miles a game, the 39th.

Those numbers together describe the job exactly. Short shifts, all of them beginning in his own end, and a sprint in almost every one of them.

He forechecks at full speed, finishes every check, kills penalties and takes the draw nobody else wants. Twelve seasons of it, on one club, with the same two wingers for most of them.

The Intangibles

Ninety-second overall in 2009, the fourth round, and 745 games without ever having played anywhere else.

The twenty-goal season in 2018-19 is the outlier and everything around it is six to ten, which is what a fourth-line centre with these zone starts scores.

He is thirty-two and the tracking says the legs have not gone. What the file cannot answer is how long a club can keep paying three men to start every shift in the wrong end when the chance share that comes back is the 26th percentile.