Chandler Stephenson

Last Season

Sixteen goals and 33 assists in 80 games — 49 points, minus-24, at 19:23 a night with six power-play goals.

The Finesse Game

A genuinely quick centre with soft hands in tight. A hundred and twenty-three unblocked attempts, sixteen goals, median 28 feet with 36 per cent from inside twenty — a very good conversion off modest volume.

Thirty-three assists is real playmaking, and 370 points in 653 games is a legitimate second-line rate.

The Physical Game

Six foot even, 201, and he is not heavy. Fourteen penalty minutes in eighty games is one of the lowest rates on the club.

The speed is the tool. He does not use it to forecheck and he does not defend with it.

The Intangibles

This is the page. Thirty-seven point seven per cent of the expected goals — the nought-th percentile, and the worst mark of any skater in the league who played a thousand five-on-five minutes — with 40.2 per cent of the shot attempts, first percentile, across 1,120 of them.

The chances underneath were 35.4 for and 58.6 against. That is a twenty-three-goal deficit in expected goals for one skater in one season, and it is the largest in this book.

He scored forty-nine points anyway, which is the whole problem: the box score says second-line centre and the ice says the puck lived in his own end for eleven hundred minutes.

Nine points in his last ten. He is 32, a third-round pick who won a Cup in Vegas, and Seattle is paying for the version that played behind Eichel and Stone. There is no version of the underlying numbers here that can be explained away by usage.