Dominik Kubalik

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

20 goals and 25 assists in 81 games — 45 points — for Detroit, at 14:55 a night. Minus-15, 174 shots at 11.5 per cent, seven on the power play, 24 penalty minutes.

45.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 26th percentile, with his ice at 44-49 against an expectation of 35.75-42.08 across 985 minutes — eight goals better than the chances at the attacking end and seven worse at the defensive.

He started 47.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 36th percentile.

Four seasons, 283 games, 161 points.

The Finesse Game

174 shots at a median of 31 feet, and twenty goals.

From twenty to forty feet: 85 shots on goal and 12 goals — 14.12 per cent, against a league forward rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 50 shots and 6 goals, 12.00 per cent, well below the league’s 17.71. Beyond forty: 33 shots and 2 goals, 6.06 per cent.

The shape is unusual and consistent across four seasons: he is a poor finisher from the crease and a good one from range, which describes a shooter with a release rather than a man who goes to the net.

94 wrist shots and 63 snap out of 244 tracked attempts, with 43 slap. 90.5 mph at the 48th percentile, on that slap count, so the number is a fair reading and it is ordinary.

79 career assists against 82 goals. The passing is secondary and the file has never claimed otherwise.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 192, with 24 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.5 mph, the 60th percentile; 0.8 bursts a game, the 42nd; 2.24 miles a game, the 26th.

Ordinary speed on low mileage, in fifteen minutes a night. There is nothing in the tracking to build a case on.

He does not forecheck heavy, does not win pucks on the wall and is not used on the penalty kill. The 26th-percentile chance share and the minus-15 are what a one-way winger costs at even strength.

What the club is buying is the shot from the top of the circle on a power play that finished sixth in the league.

The Intangibles

One hundred and ninety-first overall in 2013 to Los Angeles, who never signed him; six more seasons in Europe; and then a thirty-goal rookie season in Chicago at twenty-four.

The totals since read 38 points, 32 and 45, on a rate that has not moved much and ice time that has.

He is twenty-eight. The file is a second-line winger whose even-strength record has been below average every year and whose shot is genuinely useful on a power play, and Ottawa needed the second thing badly enough to accept the first.