David Kampf

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

7 goals and 20 assists in 82 games — 27 points — at 15:18 a night. Plus-6, 107 shots at 6.5 per cent, 8 penalty minutes.

27 points is a career high, in his sixth season, and eight penalty minutes in eighty-two games is the lowest total of any forward in this chapter.

49.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,022 minutes, the 39th percentile, with his ice at 36-38 against an expectation of 38.95-40.15.

He started 27.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 1st percentile: 142 attacking draws against 378 defensive ones. That is the whole job. Nobody on this roster is sent out cold in his own end anything like as often, and the reason Auston Matthews almost never has to is that David Kampf almost always does.

Getting to a 39th-percentile chance share out of that is the season, and it will not read that way anywhere else.

The Finesse Game

107 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 52 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 14 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 50 shots on goal and three goals — 6.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. That is the fifth-worst conversion of the 270 forwards in this book with forty or more shots on goal from inside twenty feet. From twenty to forty: 35 shots and three goals, 8.57 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 14 shots and one goal.

So he gets to the right places and nothing happens when he arrives. Fifty shots on goal from the slot is a genuine volume for a fourth-line centre, and three goals is a third of what the league gets from them.

His shot is measured at 80.8 mph, the 3rd percentile. Only Pontus Holmberg’s is softer in this chapter, and 140 tracked attempts include exactly two slap shots.

35 goals in 399 career games at 7.3 per cent. The hands are the limit and they always have been; the 20 assists and the places he takes the puck to are the reason he plays anyway.

24 backhands out of 140 attempts is a 17.1 per cent share, which is high, and it fits a man who arrives at the net facing the wrong way.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 198 pounds, with 8 penalty minutes in 82 games and 82 in 399 career games — a fifth of a penalty minute a game, across six seasons of the hardest defensive assignment on every club he has played for.

Top speed 22.7 mph at the 71st percentile, 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 60th, 2.50 miles a game at the 43rd. Quicker than the role suggests.

He is exceptionally disciplined, and a defensive centre who takes eight minutes of penalties in a full season is doing the job with his stick in the right place rather than with his arms.

He kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw, which the zone-start column makes visible even though this book cannot see who wins a faceoff.

He is not physical and does not need to be. The whole of the defensive game is position, timing and never being late.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, six seasons, 399 games, 111 points across Chicago and Toronto.

35 goals and 76 assists, and a minus-11 that is almost entirely four seasons in Chicago.

He is twenty-eight, on a club that finished fourth in the league, doing a job that shows up in nobody’s summary of the season.

An undrafted fourth-line centre with four hundred NHL games, taking the first-percentile deployment on a hundred-point club, is exactly the kind of player this book exists to make visible. The 27 points are not the point and never were.