Chandler Stephenson

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

79 games, 21 goals and 43 assists at 19:19 a night, plus-5, twenty-six penalty minutes, 125 shots, six power-play goals, one short-handed and three game-winners. Seventy-seventh overall in 2012 by Washington — the third round — seven seasons, 339 games, 154 points.

The Finesse Game

Sixty-four points is a career high by twenty-nine. The previous best was thirty-five, in fifty-one games, in this same uniform.

4.91 shots per 60 is the 38th-lowest of the 393 forwards who played forty games, and a 16.8 per cent conversion is the 39th-highest of the same 393. Almost nobody in the league takes fewer shots and almost nobody converts more of them, which is the player in one sentence and also the reason to be careful with the sixty-four.

Sixty-one per cent of his attempts came from inside twenty feet at a 20-foot median, so the conversion has a shot chart behind it rather than luck alone — but twenty-one goals from 125 shots is a rate that has to hold, and everything he had done before this season was fifty-seven goals from 358 shots.

2.35 even-strength points per 60 is the 78th percentile and twenty-two per cent of his points came on the power play, off 2:16 a night with the man advantage.

His ice went 59-56 against an expectation of 52.78-51.26 — six ahead in front and five more against, the busiest ledger on the club and very nearly a wash.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 201 pounds, and twenty-six penalty minutes in seventy-nine games.

2.67 hits per 60 is the 33rd percentile and 1.73 blocks the 51st, against 1:33 a night short-handed at the 74th.

The Intangibles

23.3 mph and 12.78 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60, the 18th-most of the 365 forwards the tracking measures, at 19:19 a night.

9.99 miles per 60 is the 80th percentile, so the sprint count is not an artefact of a short shift — he covers ground, and he covers it fast.

He is 28, a third-round pick who spent four seasons in Washington scoring at a third of this rate, and 19:19 a night was itself a career high by seventy-three seconds. The speed is real and it is measured; the shot volume is genuinely low and the conversion genuinely high. A 60-point centre who takes five shots per 60 is a man whose next season depends on other people finishing, and Vegas finished 26th in the league at exactly that.