Claude Giroux

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

35 goals and 44 assists in 82 games — 79 points — at 18:48 a night. Plus-4, 214 shots at 16.4 per cent, seven on the power play, six game-winners, 34 penalty minutes.

Thirty-five goals at thirty-five, and the best goal total of a sixteen-season career.

54.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 87th percentile, with his ice at 57-55 against an expectation of 59.12-48.84 — six goals past the chances at the defensive end.

He started 55.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 75th percentile.

Sixteen seasons, 1,100 games, 1,002 points.

The Finesse Game

214 shots at a median of 27 feet, and thirty-five goals.

Inside twenty feet: 70 shots on goal and 22 goals — 31.43 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71, and the third-best close-range rate in the league among forwards who put sixty shots on goal from there. Only Andrei Kuzmenko and Leon Draisaitl were better.

From twenty to forty: 70 shots and 9 goals, 12.86 per cent. Beyond forty: 42 shots and 3 goals, 7.14 per cent, against a league rate of 4.16.

Above the league from all three distances at thirty-five, and extravagantly so from close. An 18.68 per cent overall conversion is not going to repeat, and the underlying habit — arriving at the back post a half-second before the puck — will.

170 wrist shots out of 293 tracked attempts, with 30 slap and 25 tip-ins. 93.1 mph at the 65th percentile.

673 career assists. The passing is what a thousand points is built on and it has not moved.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 186, with 34 penalty minutes.

Top speed 23.4 mph, the 95th percentile — at thirty-five. 0.6 bursts a game, the 31st; 2.95 miles a game, the 78th.

Read those three together, because they describe something specific: the top gear is still there and he almost never uses it. That is what a sixteenth season looks like in a player who has learned exactly how much of the rink he needs to cover.

He plays a heavier game than 186 pounds should allow — he protects the puck below the goal line and takes the hit to make the play, and 452 career penalty minutes is the record of a small forward who has never avoided anything.

What has gone is the ability to carry the puck through a defence. Everything now happens off a give-and-go or from a standing position in the slot.

The Intangibles

Twenty-second overall in 2006, fifteen seasons in Philadelphia including the captaincy, and then Florida and here.

A thousand and two points in 1,100 games, of which 673 are assists, and the best goal-scoring season of the sixteen came at thirty-five on a club that finished twenty-first.

He is thirty-five on a rebuilding roster with two twenty-one-year-olds either side of him, and that is transparently what he was signed for. The measurements say there is more here than a mentor: a 54.8 per cent chance share and the third-best close-range conversion in the league are a first-line winger’s season, not a farewell one.