Jake Leschyshyn

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

No goals and no assists in 35 games, split between Vegas and the Rangers, at 9:08 a night. Minus-10, 31 shots, eight penalty minutes.

38.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 2nd percentile of this book, and his ice finished 3-14 against an expectation of 8.54-13.74 across 313 minutes.

Three goals for in 313 minutes is the number to sit with. It is a small sample and it is five and a half goals below what the chances deserved, which does not make it good.

He started 50.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 47th percentile — neutral deployment, and a chance share in the bottom fiftieth of the league out of it.

Two seasons, 76 games, 6 points.

The Finesse Game

31 shots at a median of 18 feet, 58 per cent of them from inside twenty, and no goals.

Inside twenty: 18 shots on goal and none. From twenty to forty: 11 and none.

Eighteen shots on goal from inside twenty feet without one going in is unlucky rather than damning — the league scores on about one in six of those — but two goals in 76 career games is the wider record and it says the same thing more slowly.

17 wrist shots out of 36 tracked attempts. There is not enough here to read.

Four career assists. The passing has never been the argument either.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 196, with eight penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.8 mph, the 77th percentile; 2.2 bursts a game, the 89th; and 1.54 miles a game, the 1st percentile.

That combination — near the top of the league in sprints and at the very bottom in ground covered — is nine minutes a night and nothing else. It is the same signature this book found in Julien Gauthier, and it means the shifts are short and hard.

He forechecks at speed and finishes checks, which is the whole of what a fourth-line centre at this ice time is being asked for.

What is missing is everything after the forecheck.

The Intangibles

Sixty-second overall in 2017 to Vegas, the second round, and 76 games across two seasons.

Six points in those 76 games, and none at all in thirty-five last season.

He is twenty-four. The skating is real and the rest of the file is empty, and a forward who has played most of two seasons without scoring is competing for a job that the American league usually wins.