Dawson Mercer

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

27 goals and 29 assists in 82 games — 56 points — at 16:34 a night. Plus-22, 161 shots at 16.8 per cent, one shorthanded goal, six game-winners, 14 penalty minutes.

Two eighty-two-game seasons in two tries, at twenty-one.

54.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 86th percentile, with his ice at 55-42 against an expectation of 51.94-42.59, on 51.1 per cent attacking-zone starts — the 51st percentile, which is as close to neutral deployment as this club gives anybody.

The jump from 42 points to 56 came with the plus-minus going from minus-25 to plus-22, and most of that second number is the club.

The Finesse Game

161 shots at a median of 21 feet, and this is the whole file:

Inside twenty feet: 86 shots on goal and 23 goals — 26.74 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. That is the twelfth-best close-range rate in the league among forwards who put sixty shots on goal from there. From twenty to forty: 61 shots and 4 goals, 6.56 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 11 shots, no goals.

So twenty-three of twenty-seven goals came from inside twenty feet and almost nothing came from anywhere else. He does not shoot from range and there is no evidence he should start.

84 wrist shots, 56 snap and 22 tip-ins out of 216 tracked attempts. 83.8 mph at the 8th percentile, which on twenty slap shots is a statement about what he chooses rather than what he can do.

The honest caution is the rate. A 26.74 per cent conversion from close range is near the top of the league and near the top of the league is not where a twenty-one-year-old’s true rate usually sits. Sixteen and eight-tenths per cent overall will come down.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 180, with fourteen penalty minutes in eighty-two games.

Top speed 22.8 mph, the 80th percentile; 0.9 bursts a game, the 48th; 2.63 miles a game, the 55th.

Good top-end speed that he does not often reach for, and ordinary mileage. That is a straight-line winger’s tracking profile on a man listed at centre.

He goes to the net and takes what comes with it, which at 180 pounds is a durability question that two full seasons have so far answered.

The Intangibles

Eighteenth overall in 2020, and 164 games and 98 points before his twenty-second birthday.

He has been on the ice for every game the organisation has played since he arrived, which for a modern forward is unusual enough to be an asset in itself.

What the numbers say is a shooter with one range and a very good one, on a club whose problem last season was finishing. What they do not say is whether the rate holds, and the rest of the file depends on it.