Gabriel Vilardi

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 18 assists in 63 games — 41 points — at 15:36 a night for Los Angeles. Plus-10, 122 shots at 18.9 per cent, five on the power play, six game-winners, 18 penalty minutes.

23 goals is a career high by thirteen, in his fourth season, at twenty-three.

56.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 90th percentile — the best of any forward on this roster — across 777 minutes, with his ice at 33-20 against an expectation of 32.69-25.62.

He started 54.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 68th percentile.

The Finesse Game

122 shots at a median of 16 feet, with 47 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 7 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 71 shots on goal and 16 goals — 22.54 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 45 shots and 10 goals, 22.22 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 12 shots and none.

Double the positional rate from the mid-slot and half again from close range, on a hundred and sixteen shots on goal. A career 16.6 per cent across 152 games is a very high figure and 152 games is not enough of one.

161 tracked attempts, 71 of them wrist shots, 26 tip-ins — a 16.1 per cent share — and eight slap. His shot is measured at 83.8 mph, the 8th percentile, which is among the softest of any regular forward in this book.

So the goals are not coming from the shot. He gets to the front of the net, takes the cross-check, and puts the rebound in, and a sixteen-foot median is what that looks like measured.

41 goals in 152 career games.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 216 pounds, with 18 penalty minutes in 63 games and 36 in 152 career games.

A top speed of 21.1 mph, the 5th percentile, and 0.4 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 23rd. He covers 2.29 miles a game, the 32nd.

He is slow. That is measured, it is severe, and it is the reason a man drafted eleventh overall took four years to establish himself.

He is hard to move out of the blue paint at 216 pounds, and everything in the offensive file depends on it.

He is not a forechecker and does not create a turnover by arriving. What he does is get to a place and stay in it, which at this top speed is the only version of the game available.

The Intangibles

Eleventh overall in 2017, four seasons, 152 games, 78 points across Los Angeles and Winnipeg.

41 goals and 37 assists, and a minus-3.

He is twenty-four, and the four seasons read 10 games, 54, 25 and 63 — a back injury took most of two of them.

A ninetieth-percentile chance share, a 22 per cent close-range conversion and a fifth-percentile top speed is an unusual set of facts to hold at once. What Winnipeg has bought is a net-front scorer who cannot skate and has never played seventy games, and the price was a first-line centre.