Conor Garland

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

17 goals and 29 assists in 81 games — 46 points — at 15:07 a night. Minus-5, 167 shots at 10.2 per cent, two on the power play, 31 penalty minutes.

47.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,075 minutes, the 27th percentile, with his ice at 39-41 against an expectation of 40.09-44.62.

He started 47.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 35th percentile: 288 attacking draws against 317 defensive ones — the harder half of the starts among this club’s scoring forwards.

Fifteen minutes a night is fourth-line ice time for a forty-six-point winger, and it is the thing the file turns on.

The Finesse Game

167 shots at a median of 25 feet, with 36 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: 70 shots and six goals, 8.57 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 31 shots and one goal, 3.23.

Below the positional rate at all three distances, which on a hundred and sixty-three shots on goal is a real result rather than a fluctuation. A career 10.6 per cent across 322 games says the same.

234 tracked attempts, 128 of them wrist shots, 29 slap and 23 tip-ins. 93.6 mph at the 67th percentile, which is genuinely surprising from a hundred and sixty-five pounds.

The 29 assists are the better half. He holds the puck longer than anybody on the roster and waits for a passing lane rather than throwing it at the net, and 111 career assists against 83 goals is what that produces.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 165 pounds — the second-lightest skater in this book, two pounds above Johnny Gaudreau — with 31 penalty minutes in 81 games and 125 in 322 career games.

A top speed of 21.6 mph, the 17th percentile, 1.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 65th, and 2.42 miles a game at the 38th.

That is a slow player, and it is worth stating plainly because the eye sees a small man moving in short bursts and calls it quick. He is quick over five feet and he is not fast over sixty.

He forechecks relentlessly and gets in the way of men fifty pounds heavier, which at 165 pounds is the reason he is on an NHL roster at all, and 31 penalty minutes says he does not go around anyone.

He is an agitator, and the reputation is earned.

The Intangibles

A hundred and twenty-third overall in 2015, the fifth round, five seasons, 322 games, 194 points across Arizona and Vancouver.

83 goals and 111 assists, and a plus-12 on two clubs that have between them made the playoffs once.

He is twenty-seven, on a club with three forwards ahead of him and fifteen minutes a night to show for a fifty-two-point season the year before.

A fifth-round pick at five foot ten and a hundred and sixty-five pounds with three hundred NHL games and a point every other night is a career that almost nobody projected. The tracking says the ceiling is the ceiling. The record says he keeps getting to it anyway.