Erik Gustafsson

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 35 assists in 70 games — 42 points — split between Washington and Toronto, at 19:46 a night. Plus-9, 122 shots, 23 penalty minutes.

53.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 76th percentile, with his ice at 54-41 against an expectation of 55.92-48.96.

And the number that has to be attached to the other two. He started 65.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone — the 98th percentile of this book — 464 attacking draws against 243. Forty-two points and a 53.3 per cent chance share out of the top two per cent of deployment in the league is a smaller achievement than either number looks.

Seven seasons, 379 games, 191 points, six organisations.

The Finesse Game

122 shots at a median of 48 feet, 67 per cent of them from beyond forty, and seven goals.

Inside twenty feet: 15 shots on goal and 5 goals, 33.33 per cent. Beyond forty: 71 shots and 1 goal, 1.41 per cent, less than half the positional rate.

Five of his seven goals came from fifteen shots inside the dots, and the seventy-one from the blue line produced one. That is a defenceman who scores by joining the rush rather than by shooting from the point, which is exactly what a 98th-percentile zone start is for.

42 slap shots out of 188 tracked attempts — a 22 per cent share — and 98.0 mph at the 91st percentile. The shot is genuinely hard and from range it has not gone in.

152 career assists against 39 goals. The offence is the outlet and the walk, and at thirty-one both still work.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190, with 23 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.3 mph, the 51st percentile; 0.7 bursts a game, the 34th; 2.88 miles a game, the 73rd.

Average speed on good mileage, which is what nineteen minutes of attacking-zone hockey looks like.

He does not defend. That is not a hard reading to make about a defenceman who has been on six organisations in seven seasons while scoring at forty points a year: he is not physical, does not clear his crease, and the reason clubs keep moving him is what happens when the puck goes the other way.

The 98th-percentile zone start is a coaching staff’s written statement about all of that.

The Intangibles

Ninety-third overall in 2012 to Edmonton, who never signed him; then Chicago, Calgary, Philadelphia, Montreal, Chicago again, Washington and Toronto.

The 60-point season in Chicago in 2018-19 is the outlier and 42 is the second-best of seven.

He is thirty-one and what he is has been settled for some time: a power-play defenceman who has to be started in the attacking end and paired with somebody who can defend. Six clubs have reached the same conclusion, which is the most reliable evidence in the file.