David Kampf

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

82 games, 11 goals and 15 assists at 15:16 a night, plus-12, twenty penalty minutes, 102 shots. Two of the eleven came short-handed and none on the power play. Undrafted, and 317 NHL games and eighty-four points across five seasons out of it.

The Finesse Game

He started 24.3 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end — 136 against 424 — the 5th-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts, and came out at 51.3 per cent of the expected goals.

That is the single most impressive line in this chapter and it needs reading twice. Four hundred and twenty-four defensive-zone starts against 136 in the attacking end, on a club whose top line began 62 per cent of its shifts in the other direction, and the chance ledger still came out above fifty.

51.2 per cent of the attempts is the 64th percentile among the 393 forwards who played forty games, and his ice went 38-37 against an expectation of 37.47-35.52 across 1,038 five-on-five minutes.

4.89 shots per 60 is the 9th percentile — the 38th-fewest in the league — at 10.8 per cent, from a 24-foot median with fifty-four per cent from the slot.

1.27 even-strength points per 60 is the 20th percentile and none of his twenty-six points came on the power play. Four seconds a night on it.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 198 pounds, twenty penalty minutes in eighty-two games, and 0.48 penalties taken per 60 at the 30th percentile.

3.83 hits per 60 is the 49th percentile and 1.25 blocks the 27th — the checking is positional rather than physical.

The Intangibles

2:29 a night short-handed is the 5th-most of all 393 forwards, on a club that finished 4th in the league in expected goals against per 60 on the kill.

9.85 miles per 60 is the 67th percentile and 4.4 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 the 41st, against a 22.2 mph top speed at the 35th.

Ordinary legs doing an extraordinary job. Nothing in the tracking explains how a man with a 35th-percentile top speed breaks even out of the fifth-hardest deployment in hockey, and that gap is where the coaching and the reading of the game live.

He is 27, undrafted, with eighty-four points in 317 games. The chair, the chance share out of it, eighty-two games and the kill are the whole case, and it is a real one. Twenty-six points is the ceiling — this is what a fourth-line centre is for, done as well as the record can show it being done.