Claude Giroux

Last Season

Fourteen goals and 35 assists in all 82 games — 49 points, plus-20, at 16:18 a night. His 1,345th career game and his 1,165th point. He turns 39 in January.

The Finesse Game

The hands and the head are entirely intact and the legs went some time ago. Thirty-five assists in 82 games at this age is a genuinely remarkable number, and they are made from a standstill on the half-wall, waiting for a lane nobody else has seen.

The shooting has faded: 169 unblocked attempts, ten goals, median 27 feet with 36 per cent inside twenty.

Seven hundred and eighty-six career assists.

The Physical Game

Five foot eleven, 186, and he has spent nineteen seasons being harder to play against than his size suggests. Twenty-two penalty minutes.

He takes faceoffs, kills penalties on the fourth-best unit in the league, and still goes to the net when the play demands it.

The Intangibles

Fifty-six per cent of the expected goals, 91st percentile, and 54.1 per cent of the shot attempts, 86th, with the goals 51-45 in his favour.

Plus-20 at thirty-eight, the best figure on the club, in his nineteenth season.

Five points in his last ten. This is the last stretch of one of the more underrated careers of the century, and he is still one of the six best players on a first-place defensive team.