Derek Stepan

Five hundred and four career points, ten minutes a night at thirty-two, and 1.71 miles a game — the 4th percentile.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2010-11	NYR	82	21	24	45	+8	20	3	0	3	166	12.7	16:27
2011-12	NYR	82	17	34	51	+14	22	4	0	4	169	10.1	18:57
2012-13	NYR	48	18	26	44	+25	12	4	1	6	108	16.7	20:55
2013-14	NYR	82	17	40	57	+12	18	5	0	2	199	8.5	18:03
2014-15	NYR	68	16	39	55	+26	22	3	2	3	155	10.3	18:11
2015-16	NYR	72	22	31	53	+5	20	5	3	5	192	11.5	17:45
2016-17	NYR	81	17	38	55	+19	16	4	1	2	209	8.1	18:37
2017-18	ARI	82	14	42	56	-7	26	3	2	2	209	6.7	19:16
2018-19	ARI	72	15	20	35	-2	14	1	3	3	195	7.7	19:13
2019-20	ARI	70	10	18	28	-4	16	1	1	2	158	6.3	17:39
2020-21	OTT	20	1	5	6	-6	8	0	0	0	44	2.3	15:04
2021-22	CAR	58	9	10	19	0	14	0	0	0	96	9.4	10:48
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	817	177	327	504	+90	208	33	13	32	1900	9.3	17:48

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

9 goals and 10 assists in 58 games — 19 points at 10:48 a night, even, on 96 shots and 14 penalty minutes.

Ten minutes and forty-eight seconds a night, from a man who averaged over eighteen for a decade in New York.

56.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 575 minutes, the 93rd percentile. His ice went 25-25 against an expectation of 26.74-20.3 — two goals of scoring missing and five more conceded than the chances predicted.

46.5 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the offensive zone, the 98th percentile. Sheltered fourth-line minutes on the third-best club in hockey, and he did not cost anything in them.

The Finesse Game

96 attempts at a median of 25 feet with 39 per cent from inside 20, converting at 9.4 per cent. 504 points in 817 career games and 327 assists.

The vision has outlasted everything else, and on ten minutes a night there is not much left to do with it.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 196. 1.71 miles a game is the 4th percentile among the skaters this book tracks and the top speed is 21.2 mph, the 7th — both figures are partly a consequence of ten-minute nights and both of them say the same thing about a thirty-two-year-old centre.

He takes a defensive-zone draw and a late-lead shift, which is what a fourth-line centre of 817 games is for.

The Intangibles

Fifty-first overall in 2008 by the Rangers, seven seasons there with three trips past the second round, then Arizona, Ottawa and here.

He is 32, and Carolina signed him at the deadline for a fourth-round pick and kept him for another year. The 93rd-percentile chance share is what a good club’s fourth line looks like and it is not evidence about him — the reason to keep him is that he wins a defensive draw and never needs telling twice.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

faceoffsa strength· takes the draw that starts it
“He takes a defensive-zone draw and a late-lead shift, which is what a fourth-line centre of 817 games is for”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 575 minutes

Expected goals: 56.8%; 93rd pct
Shot attempts: 56.4%; 93rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 25 for, 25 against. Expected: 26.7 and 20.3.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

33rd

Numbers

93rd

The numbers rank him 60 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

Both bars are percentiles among the 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 57 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2021-22 · 58 games

Top speed: 21.2 mph; 19th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.33 a game
Distance: 1.71 miles a game
Hardest shot: 87.6 mph; 52nd pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2021-22 · 575 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2021-22

The club: CAR took 55.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.8% — 1.6 above the club he did it on.
The role: Fourth line, 575 minutes at five-on-five — 23rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Steven Lorentz	61.6%	52.3%	54.1%
Jesperi Kotkaniemi	56.9%	56.8%	53.6%
Ian Cole	57.2%	56.7%	56.9%

61.6% together, 52.3% for him apart and 54.1% for Lorentz apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

118 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 9 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 40% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.