Isac Lundeström

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

16 goals and 13 assists in 80 games — 29 points at 15:29 a night, minus-3, with no power-play goals, 4 shorthanded goals, on 83 shots and 8 penalty minutes.

Eighty-three shots in eighty games. 4.02 shots per 60 is the 2nd percentile among the league’s forwards, and 16 of them went in — a 19.3 per cent conversion at the 96th percentile, from a man who had 6 goals in 41 games the season before.

43.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,006 minutes, the 10th percentile. His ice went 31-39 against an expectation of 33.19-42.87: two goals of scoring missing and four fewer conceded than the chances predicted, which is the goaltender.

Everybody’s number falls when he is out there. Beside Jamie Drysdale the pair took 40.2 per cent of the expected goals across 646 attempts, and Drysdale away from him was 50.1. Beside Cam Fowler, 45.5 across 621, and Fowler away from him was 52.1. The two best defencemen on the club were each roughly seven points of chance share worse with him than without him.

The Finesse Game

64 per cent of his shots came from the slot, the 90th percentile, at a median of 18 feet. The goals are not accidents of distance — he gets to the front of the net and scores from there, and that is a real and repeatable skill.

What is not repeatable is the volume. A forward who shoots four times per sixty minutes and converts at nineteen per cent has scored sixteen goals off a coin that will not keep landing, and 1.43 even-strength points per 60 at the 28th percentile is the more honest description of the offence.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 192. 1.84 hits per 60 is the 18th percentile and 2.66 blocks the 87th — he defends by being in the lane rather than by arriving late into a body.

1:54 a night shorthanded, the 89th percentile among forwards, and four of his sixteen goals were scored on it. He is trusted there and he is dangerous there, and he takes almost nothing in return: 0.19 penalties per 60 is the 3rd percentile, and plus-0.63 drawn against taken is the 93rd.

38.1 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the offensive zone, the 5th percentile among forwards. Some of the chance share is that. Not all of it.

The Intangibles

Twenty-third overall in 2018, 151 games, 44 points, and a fourth season that produced the best goal total of his career and the worst play-driving number on a roster that had plenty of competition for it.

He turns 23 in November. The question is whether the shooting was the discovery or the noise, and the answer decides whether he is a third-line centre who kills penalties or a fourth-line one, because nothing in the underlying record suggests anything above that.