Jack Eichel

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

34 games, 14 goals and 11 assists at 19:24 a night, plus-3, ten penalty minutes, 133 shots, three power-play goals and two game-winners. Second overall in 2015 by Buffalo, seven seasons, 409 games, 380 points.

Five hundred and twenty-one minutes of five-on-five ice and thirty-four games are both short of the forty games and five hundred minutes this book requires before it will place a man in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Finesse Game

He started 62.2 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end, the 30th-highest share of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts, and produced 12.10 shots per 60 out of it.

Fourteen goals and eleven assists in thirty-four games is a 60-point pace, and 133 shots in thirty-four games is 3.9 a night — a volume only a handful of forwards in this book sustain over a season.

1.83 even-strength points per 60 against 2:57 a game on the power play, which is where three of the fourteen goals came from.

A 26-foot median with forty-eight per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet. He is neither a slot man nor a perimeter shooter; he is a centre who shoots from wherever the carry ends.

His ice went 24-17 against an expectation of 22.9-20.71 — one ahead in front and nearly four fewer against than the model asked, out of the softest chair on the club.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 208 pounds, and ten penalty minutes in thirty-four games.

4.10 hits per 60 and 3.19 blocks, both middling, and 0.82 penalties drawn against 0.46 taken.

The Intangibles

23.2 mph and 15.02 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60. Only eleven of the 365 qualified forwards were above that sprint count, and he is not in the pool because he played thirty-four games — but the chip does not care how many games it measured, and this is a man skating like a healthy one.

9.92 miles per 60, and an 89.4 mph shot.

The artificial disc replacement is the fact the whole file turns on. He is 25, second overall in 2015, with 380 points in 409 games and a career plus-minus of minus-66 accumulated almost entirely in Buffalo. Thirty-four games is not a season, and the surgery had no NHL precedent when it was performed. What thirty-four games say is that the speed came back, the shot volume came back, and a club that finished 8th in the league in attempt share gave him the softest chair it had. The next question is eighty-two games, and nothing in this file answers it.