Jack Hughes

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

43 goals and 56 assists in 78 games — 99 points — at 19:58 a night. Plus-10, 336 shots at 12.8 per cent, nine on the power play, six game-winners, and six penalty minutes.

The three seasons before this one read 21 points, 31 and 56. That is not a step; it is a different player, and he was twenty-one when he took it.

57.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 95th percentile, across 1,210 minutes, with his ice at 71-57 against an expectation of 65.24-47.53.

Read the two halves of that separately, because they do not agree. Six goals better than the chances at the attacking end; ten goals worse than the chances at the defensive end. New Jersey put him on the ice for 435 attacking-zone draws against 224 in his own — 66 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 98th percentile — and the goals against still ran past what the chances deserved.

Four seasons, 244 games, 207 points, all of them in New Jersey.

The Finesse Game

336 shots at a median of 24 feet. The largest band is not the one you would guess: 167 shots on goal from twenty to forty feet, against 134 from inside twenty and 33 from beyond forty.

Inside twenty: 20 goals on 134 shots, 14.93 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 21 goals on 167, 12.57 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05.

That is the shape of the season in two lines. He is not an above-average finisher from the crease. He is an enormous volume shooter from the mid-slot who converts a little better than the league does from there, and 43 goals is what happens when a man does that four and a third times a game for seventy-eight of them.

194 wrist shots and 125 snap shots out of 422 tracked attempts, against 30 slap shots. His measured shot speed is 83.9 mph, the 8th percentile, and that number reads as shot selection rather than strength: it tracks how often a man winds up, and he almost never does.

56 assists says the other half is real, and the passing is what the shifts are actually built around.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 175 pounds, with six penalty minutes in seventy-eight games.

3.54 miles a game, the 98th percentile. Top speed 23.2 mph, the 91st. 2.4 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 91st. High in all three at once, which is rare: most men who cover that ground do it at a moderate pace, and most men with that top end do not sustain the mileage.

He does not take the body and does not defend the front of his own net, and is not asked to. The grade here describes what he is rather than complains about it.

What that leaves is the honest worry about a 175-pound forward playing twenty minutes a night at that speed, and it is the reason he has reached seventy games once in four seasons.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2019, and the three years that followed were the reason people asked whether the pick had been wrong.

He is a career minus-35 across 244 games and a plus-10 in this one, which is a statement about the club around him as much as about him.

New Jersey finished first in the league in expected goals per sixty at even strength and twenty-fifth in finishing. He is the largest single reason for the first half of that sentence, and the ten goals against past expectation on his own ice are the argument that the second half is not entirely luck.