Dylan Strome

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

23 goals and 42 assists in 81 games — 65 points — at 16:41 a night. Minus-4, 154 shots at 14.0 per cent, three on the power play, 24 penalty minutes.

65 points is a career high by eight, in his seventh season, on a contract signed for a single year after Chicago let him go.

50.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,060 minutes, the 51st percentile, with his ice at 56-49 against an expectation of 49.45-48.21.

He started 64.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 97th percentile: 391 attacking draws against 218 defensive ones. So the fifty-first percentile came out of the ninety-seventh, which is the caveat the 65 points needs.

The Finesse Game

154 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 55 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 8 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 79 shots on goal and 15 goals — 18.99 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 54 shots and seven goals, 12.96 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 14 shots and one goal.

Above the positional rate from both bands that carry the volume, on a hundred and thirty-three shots on goal, and a career 14.3 per cent across 354 games underneath it. The finishing is real.

220 tracked attempts, 99 of them wrist shots, 34 tip-ins — a 15.5 per cent share — and ten slap. His shot is measured at 86.9 mph, the 21st percentile, which is soft, and it does not matter at an eighteen-foot median.

90 goals and 145 assists in 354 career games. He holds the puck below the goal line and waits, which is where the 42 assists and a good share of the close-range shots both come from.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 200 pounds, which is tall and light, with 24 penalty minutes in 81 games and 110 in 354 career games.

A top speed of 21.5 mph, the 14th percentile, and 0.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 10th. He covers 2.66 miles a game, the 57th.

He is slow, it is the reason he was a third-overall pick who has been let go twice, and nothing in the tracking suggests it is going to change.

He is not physical and at 200 pounds spread over six foot four he does not win a battle by strength.

He protects the puck with his reach rather than his body, which works below the goal line and does not work in open ice.

The defensive half of the file is what the 97th percentile of zone starts is telling you: the coach did not want him on the ice for a defensive-zone draw.

The Intangibles

Third overall in 2015, seven seasons, 354 games, 235 points across Arizona, Chicago and Washington.

90 goals and 145 assists, and a minus-34.

He is twenty-six, and the career reads: third overall, traded at twenty-one, let go at twenty-five, sixty-five points at twenty-six on a one-year deal.

That is a genuinely good story and the numbers underneath it are more ordinary than the headline. A 51st-percentile chance share out of the 97th percentile of starts is a middle-six centre’s season with a first-line point total attached, and what Washington has bought is the point total.