Clayton Keller

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

28 goals and 35 assists in 67 games — 63 points at 20:08 a night, plus-3, with 5 power-play goals and 1 shorthanded on 177 shots, converting at 15.8 per cent, and 28 penalty minutes.

Sixty-three points in 67 games on a club that scored 207. He was on the ice for a shade under a third of everything Arizona did, and 20:08 a night is the 95th percentile among the league’s forwards — nobody was asked for more.

The season ended on 30 March with a broken femur, which is why the number is 67 and not 82.

46.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,022 minutes, the 19th percentile. His ice went 56-56 against an expectation of 38.23-44.47 — eighteen goals of scoring above what the chances predicted and twelve more conceded than they did.

Neither of those gaps is his. Arizona as a club finished 15.6 goals ahead of its five-on-five expectation, 7th in the league, and its goaltending 31.9 goals behind, 30th. His on-ice goal record is a description of the club’s shooting luck and its crease, and says almost nothing about him. The 46.2 is the number that does.

The Finesse Game

2.78 even-strength points per 60 is the 90th percentile among the league forwards and 2.71 takeaways per 60 is the 97th — most of them turn into a carry rather than a chip, which is the whole of how Arizona left its own end last season.

177 attempts at a median of 26 feet, 38 per cent from inside 20, at 84.9 mph — the 15th percentile of shot velocity. Twenty-eight goals off the softest release of any twenty-goal scorer on this roster. He shoots where a goaltender is not rather than through him.

2.36 giveaways per 60 is high and it is the price of the rest of it. A forward carrying the puck out of his own zone on the worst possession club in the league will lose it, and the alternative — chipping and chasing — was producing nothing either.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 175, and 0.76 hits per 60 is the 3rd percentile among forwards. He is not in a battle he can avoid, and at his size that is judgment rather than reluctance.

He drew 1.07 penalties per 60, the 78th percentile, and finished plus-0.44 on drawn against taken, the 83rd. Stopping him legally is hard, which is the useful form of physical presence for a man this size.

Top speed 23.1 mph, the 84th percentile, off 9.17 miles per sixty at the 15th. He is quick in a straight line and does not cover much ground, which on a club playing 38.0 per cent of its even-strength minutes in the attacking zone — his figure, the 4th percentile — describes a forward spending his shifts waiting for a puck that never arrives.

The Intangibles

Seventh overall in 2016, 360 games and 256 points by twenty-four, and the one forward on this roster a contending club would have to be talked out of.

He is 24, coming back from a broken femur, on an eight-year contract signed at twenty-one that has five years left to run. Sixty-three points at a 46 per cent chance share is either a very good player on a very bad team or a very good player being asked to do something nobody can do, and the femur means 2022-23 will not settle it either.