Jake Guentzel

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

36 goals and 37 assists in 78 games — 73 points — at 20:07 a night. Plus-2, 244 shots at 14.8 per cent, eleven on the power play, six game-winners, 46 penalty minutes.

53.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 78th percentile, with his ice at 59-49 against an expectation of 64.61-55.34 across 1,189 minutes.

He started 62 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 94th percentile, which is what happens to a winger who plays with the club’s first-line centre.

The Finesse Game

244 shots at a median of 18 feet — the shortest median on the roster — with 54 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet and 9 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty: 131 shots on goal and 21 goals, 16.03 per cent against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 83 shots and 9 goals, 10.84 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 25 shots and 4 goals.

Read flat, he finishes at about the league rate from every distance and scores 36 goals anyway. The volume is the skill. A hundred and thirty-one shots on goal from inside twenty feet is twelfth in the league, and getting there that often is a harder thing to do than converting once you have.

71 of his 344 tracked attempts are tip-ins — 20.6 per cent, the eighth-highest share of any forward who took a hundred and fifty attempts, and the direct evidence of where he works. Add 29 backhands and a third of everything he throws at the net is generated inside the goaltender’s reach.

88.2 mph, the 31st percentile, and it does not matter at eighteen feet.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 176 pounds, which is small for the job he does.

2.9 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 96th percentile, with 3.24 miles a game at the 93rd and a top speed of 22.1 mph at the 41st. He sprints far more often than almost anybody and is not, by measurement, fast.

That is the tracking signature of a winger who is repeatedly first to a loose puck in a small area rather than one who beats people down the wall.

46 penalty minutes and 210 in 453 career games. He goes to the net front against defencemen fifty pounds heavier and takes what comes with it, which is the risk carried in this file: he has reached seventy-six games twice in seven seasons.

The Intangibles

Seventy-seventh overall in 2013, the third round, seven seasons, 453 games, 414 points.

The rate is remarkable and under-discussed: 197 goals in 453 games, a 15.7 per cent career shooting percentage, and 40-goal seasons in 2018-19 and 2021-22 with 36 last year.

He has played his entire career on Sidney Crosby’s wing, and this file cannot separate the two. What it can say is that the shot chart is his own — the tip-ins, the backhands, the eighteen-foot median — and that those are habits rather than gifts of proximity.

He turns twenty-nine in October, and he is the only forward on this roster under thirty who has ever scored twenty goals.