Evgeni Malkin

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

27 goals and 56 assists in 82 games — 83 points — at 18:35 a night. Minus-12, 240 shots at 11.3 per cent, eleven on the power play, three game-winners, 82 penalty minutes.

82 games is the most he has played since 2008-09, and only the third 82-game season of a seventeen-year career.

54.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 84th percentile, with his ice at 53-50 against an expectation of 61.16-50.31 across 1,133 minutes. Eight goals short of what the chances called for, which on this club was the ordinary experience rather than his own failing.

He started 66.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 99th percentile — the sixth-highest share of any skater in this book, behind Barzal, Krug, Ovechkin, Zucker and Kaprizov. A 54.9 per cent chance share out of that deployment is a smaller achievement than it looks.

The Finesse Game

240 shots at a median of 28 feet. Inside twenty: 92 shots on goal and 19 goals, 20.65 per cent against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 94 shots and 8 goals, 8.51 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 53 shots and one goal.

Read across, that is a player whose value is now entirely inside twenty feet and who is still taking a third of his shots from outside forty. Fifty-three shots on goal from long range returned one goal.

313 tracked attempts: 157 wrist, 52 snap, 49 slap, 28 backhand. The slap share of 15.7 per cent is very high for a forward and most of it is the point shot on the power play, where eleven of his 27 goals were scored.

91.1 mph at the 52nd percentile. The shot is ordinary by measurement and it never was the thing: he is a puck-protection centre who buys the extra second and then finds the pass.

The Physical Game

213 pounds, 82 penalty minutes, and a career total of 1,090 in 1,063 games.

The skating is where the age shows first. Top speed 21.4 mph, the 10th percentile; 0.6 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 32nd. He still covers 3.09 miles a night, the 84th percentile, which says he takes long shifts rather than fast ones.

That is a real change. A man who cannot get to top speed and still leads the club’s forwards in ground covered is winning his ice by holding onto the puck, and he is one of very few players who can still do that at thirty-six.

He retaliates. The 82 minutes are not from forechecking, and a share of them arrive after somebody has done something to him first.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2004, seventeen seasons, 1,063 games, 1,229 points.

The career reads as three Hart-level peaks and a great deal of missed time: 109 points in 2011-12, 98 in 2017-18, and eight seasons under sixty games. The 82 games last season are the outlier at the end of it.

471 goals and 758 assists, and the second-line centre job on a club whose first-line centre is thirty-five. That pairing is the reason Pittsburgh has been hard to play for seventeen years and it is also the reason there is no obvious next thing.

At thirty-six, given the easiest starts on the roster and a winger’s minutes, he produced 83 points. That is the correct use of him and it is worth saying that the club found it.