Chris Kreider

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

36 goals and 18 assists in 79 games — 54 points — at 18:25 a night. Plus-21, 229 shots at 15.7 per cent, eight on the power play, four shorthanded, 26 penalty minutes.

51.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 63rd percentile, with his ice at 48-29 against an expectation of 45.04-42.21 — thirteen goals better than the chances at the defensive end.

He started 48.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 37th percentile: 309 attacking draws against 334, which for a thirty-six-goal scorer is unusual and is what four shorthanded goals looks like in the deployment.

Eleven seasons, 733 games, 477 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

229 shots at a median of 14 feet, with 60 per cent of them from inside twenty, and the chart is one of the two or three most concentrated in this book.

Inside twenty feet: 134 shots on goal and 32 goals — 23.88 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 57 shots and 4 goals. Beyond forty: 34 shots and none at all.

Thirty-two of his thirty-six goals came from inside twenty feet. There is no second range and there does not need to be.

And the mechanism, which is the most extreme in the league. 98 tip-ins out of 335 tracked attempts — 29 per cent, and the highest count of any player in the edition. Brady Tkachuk took 87 and Anders Lee 78; nobody redirects more.

137 wrist shots and 15 slap. 88.7 mph at the 36th percentile, which given what he does with the puck is beside the point entirely.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 232 pounds, with 26 penalty minutes and 525 in his career.

Top speed 23.2 mph, the 91st percentile. 3.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 97th. 2.65 miles a game, the 57th.

A 232-pound winger of thirty-two in the top three per cent of the league for how often he reaches full speed. That combination is why he has scored 265 goals: he arrives at the net at a velocity nobody can absorb and then stands there.

He goes to the front on the power play, takes the cross-check and gets his stick on the puck, and he does it on the penalty kill too — the four shorthanded goals are the same skating used the other way.

He clears his own crease and finishes checks along the wall. At this size and this speed, nothing about the physical file is theoretical.

The Intangibles

Nineteenth overall in 2009, and 733 games in one uniform.

The 52 goals in 2021-22 is the outlier and 36 is the second-best season of his career; the shape underneath both is the same thing done more often.

He is thirty-two and the tracking says the legs are still there. What will decide the last third of the career is whether a game built on arriving hard at the net survives the moment it stops arriving fast, and there is nothing else in the file to fall back on.