Ilya Mikheyev

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

13 goals and 15 assists in 46 games — 28 points — at 16:55 a night. Plus-3, 91 shots at 14.3 per cent, one on the power play, two game-winners, 2 penalty minutes.

Forty-six games, ended by a knee injury, in the first season of a contract signed the summer before.

48.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 640 minutes, the 32nd percentile, with his ice at 40-33 against an expectation of 25.43-27.18.

Fifteen more goals were scored on his ice than the chances called for, in six hundred and forty minutes. Per sixty minutes that is the second-largest finishing gap of the 524 skaters in this book who played six hundred minutes, behind only Jared McCann, and it is why a 32nd-percentile chance share produced a plus-3.

He started 48.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 38th percentile.

The Finesse Game

91 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 51 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 47 shots on goal and seven goals — 14.89 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 32 shots and four goals, 12.50 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 11 shots and two goals.

A career 11.1 per cent across 192 games, and 49 goals in those games.

112 tracked attempts, 53 of them wrist shots and 22 backhands — a 19.6 per cent share, which is very high and fits a forward who arrives at the net at speed and off balance. 88.4 mph at the 33rd percentile.

The shot is the weak part of the file and always has been. Five shorthanded goals in 192 career games say where the value actually is: he is out on the kill because he can outskate a breakout, and four of those five came in one season.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 192 pounds, with 2 penalty minutes in 46 games and 38 in 192 career games — about a fifth of a penalty minute a game, which is remarkable for a forward who plays this hard.

2.1 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 86th percentile, at a top speed of 22.6 mph, the 68th, on 2.62 miles a game at the 54th.

He is a genuinely fast straight-line skater and the burst count is the number that shows it.

He is exceptionally disciplined — two minutes in forty-six games from a man who forechecks and kills penalties is an extraordinary rate.

He forechecks hard and arrives first, which is the whole of the physical game; he does not finish checks and does not need to.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, four seasons, 192 games, 100 points across Toronto and Vancouver.

49 goals and 51 assists, and a plus-31 on clubs that have not been good.

He is twenty-eight, a Russian winger who came over at twenty-four, and has not yet played sixty games in an NHL season.

The durability is the file. Thirty-nine games, fifty-four, fifty-three, forty-six: four seasons and not one of them complete, with a serious injury in the first and a knee in the last. What he does when he plays is a useful third-line forward with real speed and no penalty minutes. How often he plays is the question nobody has answered.