Corey Perry

Last Season

Seventeen goals and 37 points in 72 games, five of the goals on the power play, with 81 penalty minutes — the most on the team — in under fourteen minutes a night. That is a remarkable rate of production for a fourth-line workload at his age.

The Finesse Game

The skating went years ago and he has built a game that does not need it. What he has left is a pair of hands that still work in a crowd, a heavy stick around the net, and the best sense of where a rebound is going of anyone on the roster. He scores from within ten feet and has for a decade.

On the power play he stands at the net front, screens, tips, and turns the ugly puck into a goal. He is genuinely one of the better net-front players in the league at an age when most players are broadcasting.

The Physical Game

Six-three and 210 and he is still a nuisance. He cross-checks, he holds, he talks, and he draws penalties by making opponents lose their composure. Eighty-one penalty minutes is a career habit, not a decline.

He is not going to win a foot race or a wall battle against a strong young defenceman. He does not enter contests he cannot win.

The Intangibles

A Cup, a Hart, a Rocket Richard, and a run of Finals appearances with four different clubs in his late thirties. Teams keep acquiring him in the spring for a reason, and it is not sentiment.

He is forty-one. There is no projection here beyond the obvious: he will play until the hands go, and they have not gone.