J.T. Miller

Last Season

Seventeen goals and 36 assists in 68 games — 53 points, minus-30, at 20:09 a night with 33 penalty minutes. His 939th career game.

The Finesse Game

The shot selection is excellent. Fifty-one per cent of his unblocked attempts came from inside twenty feet, median 20, and eighteen goals came out of 228 tries.

Thirty-six assists in 68 games is a first-line playmaking rate. Seven hundred and sixty-two points in 939 games is a genuine career.

The Physical Game

Six foot even, 211, and he plays a hard, verbal, agitating game that has followed him through three organisations. Thirty-three penalty minutes is lower than his reputation.

He goes to the net front and he protects pucks below the goal line.

The Intangibles

The minus-30 is the worst figure in this edition and it is close to meaningless. At five-on-five he was on for 38 goals for and 32 against, with the chances 40.1 to 37.5 in his favour and an on-ice rate in the 68th percentile.

So a plus-six at five-on-five and a minus-thirty overall. That gap is the penalty kill — New York finished 27th — and empty nets, and it is one of the cleanest illustrations in this book of why the column should be ignored.

Eleven points in his last ten. He is 33 and returns to the club that drafted him. Nothing about last season says he has declined.