Jake Leschyshyn

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

41 games, 2 goals and 4 assists at 11:18 a night, minus-2, eight penalty minutes, 35 shots. Sixty-second overall in 2017 by Vegas — the second round — one season, 41 games, 6 points.

Four hundred and thirty-four minutes of five-on-five ice is short of the five hundred this book requires, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Finesse Game

Two goals from thirty-five shots is 5.7 per cent, from a 20-foot median with fifty-nine per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet.

0.84 even-strength points per 60, and 4.53 shots per 60.

40.3 per cent of the expected goals and 39.8 per cent of the attempts across 434 five-on-five minutes. Both are the worst figures attached to any skater in this chapter, on a club that finished 8th in the league in attempt share.

He started 45.2 per cent of his end-zone shifts in the attacking end, the 182nd-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts, which is a genuinely hard chair and does not come close to explaining a thirteen-point gap in share against a club that controlled the puck all year.

His ice went 13-17 against an expectation of 15.31-22.68 — two short in front and five and a half fewer against, which is the one merciful line in the file.

The with-and-without makes it worse. All six of his recorded partners were better without him, and the smallest of those gaps was just under eight points of share.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 196 pounds, and eight penalty minutes in forty-one games.

5.83 hits per 60 and 2.98 blocks, both respectable for eleven minutes, against 0.52 penalties drawn per 60 and 0.52 taken.

The Intangibles

22.5 mph and 11.27 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60, and 10.02 miles per 60 — the sprint count and the ground covered are both good, drawn from forty-one games and a short shift.

A man who skates this hard and controls this little of the play is the shape of a fourth-liner whose legs are ahead of his reads, and at 23 that is the version of the problem worth having.

He is 23, a second-round pick of this club, in his first NHL season. The tracking is encouraging and the possession numbers are as bad as this book records for a Vegas skater. Forty-one games is enough to notice and not enough to conclude.