Jared McCann

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

40 goals and 30 assists in 79 games — 70 points — at 16:20 a night. Plus-18, 210 shots at 19.1 per cent, seven on the power play, three shorthanded, three game-winners, 14 penalty minutes.

Forty goals in sixteen minutes a night. His previous best was 27.

54.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 992 minutes, the 84th percentile — and his ice finished 67-44 against an expectation of 43.40-35.63. Twenty-four goals more than the chances called for at the good end and eight more at the other.

He started 55.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 75th percentile.

Seattle as a club finished plus-40.6 in finishing — first in the league — scoring 209 five-on-five goals against an expectation of 168.4. More of that belongs to this file than to any other on the roster.

The Finesse Game

210 shots at a median of 32 feet, which for a forty-goal scorer is a long way out.

Inside twenty feet: 43 shots on goal and 15 goals — 34.88 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 96 shots and 19 goals, 19.79 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 60 shots and five goals, 8.33, against a league rate of 4.16.

Roughly double the positional rate at every distance on the rink, on two hundred shots on goal. He is one of twenty-eight forwards in the league who beat the rate from all three bands on twenty or more shots on goal in each, and the company on that list is Draisaitl, Rantanen, Robertson and Kaprizov.

A 19.1 per cent shooting percentage is the fifth-highest of the 144 forwards in this book who took a hundred and fifty shots, and it sits against a career figure of 12.2 across 506 games.

That difference is about fourteen goals. The honest statement of this file is that a genuinely good shooter had the best finishing season of his life on the club that had the best finishing season in the league, and that both of those things regress.

287 tracked attempts, 154 wrist and 37 slap. 94.8 mph at the 77th percentile — a hard shot, and unlike most hard shots in this book it is going in from range.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 191 pounds, with 14 penalty minutes in 79 games and 169 in 506 for a career.

Top speed 21.9 mph at the 27th percentile, 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 60th, 2.57 miles a game at the 50th. There is nothing in the tracking line that stands out, which is worth saying plainly: this is not a player who scores by getting there first.

He scores by shooting from where nobody else does. Ninety-six shots on goal from between twenty and forty feet is the second-highest count on the roster, and nineteen of them went in.

He is not a physical forward and does not need to be. Seattle rolled four lines and no forward on the roster played eighteen minutes a night.

Three shorthanded goals. He kills penalties and the release is quick enough to punish a bad clear.

The Intangibles

Twenty-fourth overall in 2014, eight seasons, 506 games, 275 points across Vancouver, Florida, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

The first six seasons produced between 7 and 35 points. The two in Seattle produced 50 and 70.

He is twenty-seven. What changed is partly opportunity — 16:20 a night with a power play — and mostly the shooting percentage, and the file cannot separate those two cleanly on two seasons.

What it can say is that 27 goals at 13.6 per cent in 2021-22 and 40 at 19.1 in 2022-23 are two different seasons from the same player, and that the first of them is the safer description.