J.T. Miller

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

32 goals and 50 assists in 81 games — 82 points — at 20:41 a night. Minus-7, 223 shots at 14.4 per cent, eleven on the power play, five shorthanded, 60 penalty minutes.

82 points follows the 99 he scored in 2021-22, and 32 goals matches that season exactly.

47.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,128 minutes, the 28th percentile, with his ice at 40-54 against an expectation of 44.09-49.00 — four fewer goals than the chances called for at the good end and five more at the other.

That is the row that made the season contentious. A 51.1 per cent share of the attempts, a 28th-percentile share of the chances, and a minus-7 on a club that finished twenty-second.

He started 50.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 47th percentile: 364 attacking draws against 359 defensive ones. Nothing about the deployment explains it.

The Finesse Game

223 shots at a median of 30 feet, and 311 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 73 shots on goal and 15 goals — 20.55 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 92 shots and 11 goals, 11.96 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 57 shots and eight goals — 14.04 per cent, against a league rate of 4.16.

Stop on that third line. Eight goals from fifty-seven shots on goal beyond forty feet is the second-best long-range rate of the 60 forwards in this book with forty or more shots from there, behind only Steven Stamkos, and it is three and a third times what the league manages.

And he does it without winding up. 29 slap shots out of 311 attempts is a 9.3 per cent share — and his shot is measured at 98.8 mph, the 94th percentile, which is the hardest on this roster.

So he is Stamkos’s company at range with a tenth of the slap shots, and the point this edition has been making all the way through holds again: the velocity is real, the wind-up is not what delivers it.

A career 14.4 per cent across 718 games says the finishing is his and not a season’s froth. 40 tip-ins is a 12.9 per cent share, and 201 career goals sit against 335 assists.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 211 pounds, with 60 penalty minutes in 81 games and 383 in 718 career games.

2.0 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 86th percentile and 3.01 miles a game at the 80th, at a top speed of 22.3 mph, the 53rd. A great deal of hard skating from ordinary top-end speed.

He forechecks hard, finishes his checks, and is genuinely unpleasant to play against, which at 211 pounds and twenty minutes a night is a real part of the value.

He also retaliates, and the 60 penalty minutes are not all pressure fouls: he answers, he chirps, and the penalty column has looked like this for eleven seasons.

The skating holds up under that load, which is the thing to notice: eighty-one games at twenty-one minutes a night with the fourth-most bursts on this roster, at thirty.

The Intangibles

Fifteenth overall in 2011, eleven seasons, 718 games, 536 points across the Rangers, Tampa Bay and Vancouver.

201 goals and 335 assists at a career 14.4 per cent, and a plus-35.

He is thirty, on a long contract, on a club that finished twenty-second and has spent three seasons arguing about whether he is part of the solution.

What this book can say is what the columns say. The scoring is real and repeatable, the long-range finishing is genuinely exceptional, and the chance share on his ice last season was the 28th percentile out of even starts. All three of those are true at once, and any account of him that uses only one of them is selling something.