Jake Neighbours

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

77 games, 27 goals and 11 assists for 38 points, 8 on the power play, 21 penalty minutes, 15:42 a night and minus-16, with 4 game-winners. He took 42.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 985 minutes, the 20th percentile, and his ice went 37-43 against an expectation of 35.44-47.34.

Two goals of finishing above what the chances were worth and four goals of goaltending above them. Twenty-seven goals at 18.6 per cent on the twentieth-percentile chance share is a season built almost entirely out of finishing.

The Finesse Game

194 attempts at a median of 14 feet with 59 per cent of them from inside twenty, 144 of those on goal, converted at 18.6 per cent against a career 16.50 across 206 shots.

A fourteen-foot median attempt is the eighth-closest forward chart in this edition. He does not shoot from anywhere else — he goes to the paint, stands in it, and puts back what arrives — and 8 of his 27 goals came on the power play doing exactly that.

The Physical Game

He is 6-0 and 201 and took 21 penalty minutes.

Forty-seven career penalty minutes in 129 games. He is solidly built and takes a beating in front of the net without answering it, which is why he can stand there for eighty games; there is more physical game here than the penalty total suggests.

The Intangibles

Twenty-sixth overall in 2020 by St. Louis, three seasons, one organisation, and 50 points in 129 games.

A career minus-37 in 129 games. He is 22, he scored 27 goals in his first full season, and the whole question is whether a man who lives in the paint can keep converting at eighteen per cent.