Erik Karlsson

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

25 goals and 76 assists in 82 games — 101 points — at 25:37 a night for San Jose. Minus-26, 209 shots at 12.0 per cent, five on the power play, four game-winners, 36 penalty minutes.

His previous best was 82 points in 2015-16. He beat it by nineteen at thirty-two, in his fourteenth season, on a club that finished with the fourth-worst record in hockey.

51.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 55th percentile, with his ice at 96-96 against an expectation of 79.52-75.78. He played 1,683 five-on-five minutes, more than any other skater in this book — fifty-three more than Adam Larsson and seventy-five more than Owen Power.

Both ends of that goal record ran hot: sixteen more goals scored on his ice than the chances called for and twenty more conceded. A minus-26 built out of 96 goals against is not the same object as a minus-26 built out of forty.

He started 64.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 97th percentile, which is the usage a bad team gives its one asset.

The Finesse Game

209 shots at a median of 47 feet, 66 per cent of them from beyond forty, and a shot measured at 100.8 mph — the 98th percentile.

From beyond forty feet he put 127 shots on goal and scored twelve. That is 9.45 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty he was six from 56, and inside twenty seven from 20.

Of the 109 defencemen in the league who put sixty or more shots on goal from beyond forty feet, nobody converted at a higher rate. Tyson Barrie is second at 8.11, John Klingberg third at 7.25. Karlsson is a third clear of the field and three times the positional rate.

And this is the number that will not be explained by the obvious mechanism. He slaps 91 of his 287 tracked attempts — 31.7 per cent — which is within a point of Jacob Trouba’s share three chapters ago, and Trouba converted at 1.33 from the same distance. Across those 109 defencemen the correlation between slap-shot share and long-range conversion is r = 0.291. Whatever is separating these two men, it is not what they are hitting the puck with.

What it probably is, and this book cannot measure it: the shot arrives from a different place each time, because he has walked the line before releasing it. That is an inference about how the shot is generated and the tracking data holds no record of it.

161 wrist shots against 91 slaps, and 23 snap. The wrist shot from the point is the majority of his volume and the slap shot is the one everybody watches.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 185 pounds, and 3.49 miles a game at the 97th percentile at a top speed of 22.4 mph, the 59th, with 1.7 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 78th.

That is the shape of a defenceman who is never standing still and is rarely at full stretch, which describes most of the men who play twenty-five minutes. What is unusual here is the volume of it at thirty-two on a club that was behind in most games.

36 penalty minutes in 82 games. He does not defend by removing people and never has: the puck is taken back by getting to it first, and when that fails there is no second method.

That is the standing objection to him and the record above is the standing answer. A club with him on the ice for 1,683 minutes gave up twenty more goals than the chance model expected, and scored sixteen more.

The Intangibles

Fifteenth overall in 2008, fourteen seasons, 920 games, 761 points.

The career splits in two: nine seasons in Ottawa averaging 24 minutes a night, then five in San Jose in which he played 211 games out of a possible 328 and scored at a rate nobody would have written down in 2016.

Then 101 points at thirty-two. Whether that is a recovered player or one good year is the question Pittsburgh has bet on, and the honest answer is that a single season cannot tell them apart.

He arrives on a club whose three most important players are 36, 37 and 36. The roster he joins does not have time to find out slowly.