Evgeny Kuznetsov

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

12 goals and 43 assists in 81 games — 55 points — at 18:04 a night. Minus-26, 172 shots at 7.0 per cent, five on the power play, 56 penalty minutes.

44.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 12th percentile, across 1,083 minutes, with his ice at 46-51 against an expectation of 42.75-53.79.

He started 62.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 94th percentile: 395 attacking draws against 241 defensive ones.

That pair of numbers is the harshest thing in this chapter. The 94th percentile of starts and the 12th percentile of chances is a gap in the wrong direction of eighty-two points, and it is the largest such gap on this roster by a distance. Nothing about the deployment excuses the minus-26; the deployment is what produced it.

The Finesse Game

172 shots at a median of 30 feet, and 241 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 60 shots on goal and 13 goals — 21.67 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 79 shots and three goals, 3.80 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 36 shots and one goal, 2.78, below the league rate of 4.16.

Three goals from seventy-nine mid-slot shots is a third of what the league manages, and it is the reason a 21.67 per cent close-range rate produced only twelve goals.

A career 11.2 per cent across 680 games, against 7.0 last season. On 172 shots that difference is about seven goals, so a fair share of the drop was luck.

The 43 assists are the file and always have been. 386 career assists against 165 goals, from a centre who holds the puck through the neutral zone longer than anybody on this roster and makes the play at the last possible moment.

69 snap shots out of 241 attempts is a 28.6 per cent share, which is very high, and his shot is measured at 93.9 mph, the 70th percentile.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 207 pounds, with 56 penalty minutes in 81 games and 364 in 680 career games.

3.08 miles a game at the 84th percentile and 1.8 bursts above twenty a game at the 80th, at a top speed of 22.7 mph, the 74th. Above average on all three, which is a genuinely good tracking line for a thirty-year-old centre.

So the feet are not the problem, and this is the file where that matters most.

He does not forecheck and he does not track back hard, and the 12th-percentile chance share out of the 94th percentile of starts is what a talented player who does not work without the puck produces.

He is not physical and does not try to be at 207 pounds. That part is fine; the other part is not.

He is a genuine playmaker and the assists are earned, which is why a club keeps writing the cheque.

The Intangibles

Twenty-sixth overall in 2010, ten seasons, 680 games, 551 points, all of them here, and a Stanley Cup, with 32 points in the 24 games of it.

165 goals and 386 assists, and a plus-49 across a career of which last season’s minus-26 is the worst by a distance.

He is thirty-one, on a long contract, on a club that has just missed the playoffs for the first time since 2014.

The playoff run in 2018 is the highest thing on his record and the 12th percentile is the most recent. What the file describes is one of the best passers in the league attached to a work rate that a good club can carry and a bad one cannot.