Ivan Barbashev

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

16 goals and 29 assists in 82 games — 45 points — at 16:45 a night between St. Louis and Vegas. Plus-1, 126 shots at 12.7 per cent, two on the power play, 42 penalty minutes.

45 points is his second-best season, behind the 60 he scored in 2021-22.

47 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 26th percentile, across 1,149 minutes, with his ice at 53-48 against an expectation of 47.32-53.44 — six more goals scored than the chances called for and five fewer allowed.

He started 50.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 46th percentile: 289 attacking draws against 288 defensive ones. Even, so the deployment explains none of the 26th percentile.

The season was split between St. Louis, which finished twenty-seventh in chance share, and Vegas, which finished fifteenth.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 53 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 10 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 67 shots on goal and 11 goals — 16.42 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 41 shots and three goals, 7.32 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 14 shots and one goal.

And then the career line, which is the reason this file is interesting: a 17.5 per cent shooting percentage across 433 games and 480 shots. That is the third-highest of the 294 skaters in this book with four hundred or more career games, behind only Leon Draisaitl and Brayden Point.

The seasons read 25.0, 15.6, 23.3, 14.7, 11.6, 23.4 and 12.7 per cent. That is not a stable skill, it is a small-volume shooter whose rate swings wildly, and the two years above 23 per cent came on 60 and 111 shots.

177 tracked attempts, 32 of them tip-ins — an 18.1 per cent share — and four slap shots.

84 goals in 433 career games. What the file actually says is that he scores from the net-front, on low volume, at a rate that will not survive more shots.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 203 pounds, with 42 penalty minutes in 82 games and 134 in 433 career games.

Top speed 22.0 mph at the 36th percentile, 0.7 bursts above twenty a game at the 34th, 2.66 miles a game at the 57th. An ordinary tracking line in every direction.

He forechecks hard and finishes his checks, and at 203 pounds on a scoring line that is the part of the job the numbers above do not show.

He goes to the front of the net and stays there, which an 18-foot median and 32 tip-ins record between them.

He is not fast and does not beat anybody wide. Everything happens inside twenty feet of a goaltender.

The Intangibles

Thirty-third overall in 2014, the second round, seven seasons, 433 games, 194 points across St. Louis and Vegas, and two Stanley Cups — one in St. Louis in 2019 and one here.

84 goals and 110 assists, and a plus-14.

He is twenty-seven, and he has now been traded once at a deadline and won a Cup in the same spring, having done exactly the same thing four years earlier without the trade.

Two Cups by twenty-seven from a second-round pick is a career already worth having. The caution is the shooting percentage: 45 points on a 26th-percentile chance share is a good outcome badly supported, and a club paying for the 60-point season is paying for 23.4 per cent.