Chandler Stephenson

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

16 goals and 49 assists in 81 games — 65 points — at 19:01 a night. Plus-12, 120 shots at 13.3 per cent, six on the power play, one shorthanded, five game-winners, 26 penalty minutes.

65 points is a career high by one, and 49 assists a career high by six, in his eighth season.

51.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,145 minutes, the 61st percentile, with his ice at 59-44 against an expectation of 49.23-45.72 — ten more goals than the chances called for at the good end.

He started 51.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 56th percentile.

The Finesse Game

120 shots at a median of 20 feet, with 50 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 62 shots on goal and 10 goals — 16.13 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 45 shots and six goals, 13.33 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 12 shots and one goal.

His shot is measured at 83.5 mph, the 7th percentile, and 165 tracked attempts contain five slap shots.

So a hundred and twenty shots in eighty-one games is a low volume taken softly from close range, and the 13.3 per cent is a career 15.3 per cent coming back towards the league. Neither figure is the file.

The 49 assists are. He is the passer on a line with Jack Eichel and Mark Stone, which is a job with a low degree of difficulty and a high ceiling, and 146 career assists against 73 goals says the distribution is his own.

He carries the puck through the neutral zone and enters the offensive zone with it, which is what his skating is actually for.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 201 pounds, with 26 penalty minutes in 81 games and 107 in 420 career games.

3.9 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 98th percentile — at a top speed of 23.0 mph, the 86th, on 3.05 miles a game, the 82nd.

That is an outstanding tracking line and it is the whole athletic case. Only a handful of forwards in this book reach twenty miles an hour four times a game, and he does it at nineteen minutes a night.

The contrast inside the file is the interesting part: the 98th percentile of bursts and the 7th percentile of shot speed, in the same player. He gets there first and cannot finish once he arrives.

He forechecks hard and kills penalties, and six career shorthanded goals from a man who was a fourth-line centre for four seasons in Washington is where the coaching trust came from.

He is not physical and does not need to be at this speed.

The Intangibles

Seventy-seventh overall in 2012, the third round, eight seasons, 420 games, 219 points across Washington and Vegas, and two Stanley Cups — one in Washington in 2018 and one here.

73 goals and 146 assists, and a plus-60.

He is twenty-nine, a third-round pick who spent four seasons as a fourth-line centre and became a first-line one after a trade for a fifth-round pick at twenty-five.

Two Cups on two clubs, from a man who was surplus to both when he arrived. What the record says is that the skating was always going to play and that somebody had to notice; what it does not settle is how much of 65 points belongs to the wingers.