Jack Eichel

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

27 goals and 39 assists in 67 games — 66 points — at 18:46 a night. Plus-26, 223 shots at 12.1 per cent, two on the power play, 6 penalty minutes.

Sixty-seven games, in his second season here, and the first winning hockey he has played.

52.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 970 minutes, the 64th percentile, with his ice at 56-35 against an expectation of 43.54-39.78.

Thirteen more goals scored on his ice than the chances called for and five fewer allowed — an eighteen-goal swing in his favour, which is most of the plus-26 and none of it repeatable.

He started 54.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 69th percentile.

The Finesse Game

223 shots at a median of 28 feet, and 283 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 65 shots on goal and 13 goals — 20.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 98 shots and 11 goals, 11.22 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 38 shots and three goals, 7.89, against a league rate of 4.16.

Above the positional rate at all three distances, on two hundred and one shots on goal.

188 of his 283 attempts are wrist shots — a 66.4 per cent share — and seventeen are slap shots. His shot is measured at 97.8 mph, the 91st percentile.

That pair of facts is worth stating together: the fourth-hardest shot on this roster comes off a stick that almost never winds up. A wrist shot at 97 mph is why goaltenders are beaten from twenty-eight feet.

A career 10.7 per cent across 476 games, against 12.1 last season. There is not much froth here.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 208 pounds, with 6 penalty minutes in 67 games and 158 in 476 career games.

4.6 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 99th percentile, and the fourth-most of any skater in this book, behind Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid and Brayden Point — at a top speed of 23.8 mph, the 98th. He covers 3.15 miles a game, the 87th.

That is one of the three or four best tracking lines in this edition and it is not close. He is fast, he is fast constantly, and he covers ground doing it, at 208 pounds and nineteen minutes a night.

The skating is worth dwelling on because of what it followed. He missed most of a season and had his neck operated on, and the measurement above is the answer to every question anybody had about whether he would be the same player.

Six penalty minutes in a full season from a first-line centre is a remarkable figure.

He carries the puck out of his own end himself and enters the offensive zone with it, which at this speed is the most efficient thing his club can do with a shift.

He is not a physical forward and does not finish checks, and at this speed he does not need to arrive by contact.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2015, eight seasons, 476 games, 446 points across Buffalo and Vegas, and a Stanley Cup.

180 goals and 266 assists, and a minus-40 that belongs entirely to six seasons in Buffalo — he is a plus-29 in Vegas.

He is twenty-six, and the two halves of the career are almost comically separate: six seasons of eighty-point hockey on a club that never made the playoffs, then a trade, neck surgery, and a Cup.

What the file records is a genuinely elite skating centre whose production has been the same everywhere and whose results have not. The 99th-percentile burst count is the thing to keep watching; if it holds into his thirties, so does everything else.