Jakob Silfverberg

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

5 goals and 16 assists in 53 games — 21 points at 17:02 a night, minus-3, with 1 power-play goal on 120 shots and 30 penalty minutes.

Five goals on 120 shots is 4.2 per cent, the 3rd percentile among the league’s forwards, against a career rate of 9.4 and seasons of 24 and 21 goals as recently as 2018-19 and 2019-20. Eight goals in 47 games the year before that; five in 53 now. This is the second consecutive season of it, which is what stops it being bad luck.

43.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 675 minutes, the 7th percentile. His ice went 22-29 against an expectation of 22.19-29.17 — almost exactly what the chances predicted at both ends, which is the unkind reading: nothing went wrong. That was the play.

Everyone he touched came down. Beside Hampus Lindholm he took 35.8 per cent of the expected goals across 448 attempts; Lindholm apart from him was 51.8. Beside Jamie Drysdale, 37.5 across 407; Drysdale apart from him, 49.5.

The Finesse Game

120 attempts at a median of 32 feet, 31 per cent from inside 20 and 27 per cent from beyond 40, at 91.3 mph. The shot chart has not changed; the puck has stopped going in.

1.99 takeaways per 60 is the 75th percentile and remains real. He reads a play before it develops and he strips pucks in the neutral zone, and that is the part of the game a decline in hands does not take away.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 207, and 1.06 hits per 60 is the 6th percentile among forwards. He never played that way. He plays 2:10 a night shorthanded, the 96th percentile among forwards, and 2.66 blocks per 60 at the 86th, and that is where the value now is.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 61st percentile, and 9.32 miles per sixty at the 23rd. He is not slow. He covers less ground than he used to and spends 38.8 per cent of his even-strength time in the offensive zone, the 10th percentile — some of that is deployment, and some of it is a winger who no longer gets there first.

The Intangibles

Thirty-ninth overall in 2009, 658 games, 328 points, and ten seasons in Anaheim after Ottawa traded him in the Bobby Ryan deal. He is one of two forwards here with a positive career plus-minus, and the other one signed in July.

He turns 32 in October. A club rebuilding around a twenty-one-year-old and a nineteen-year-old defenceman does not obviously need a thirty-two-year-old third-line winger who has scored 13 goals in two seasons, and everybody involved knows it. The penalty kill is the argument for the season he is about to play.