Jean-Gabriel Pageau

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

13 goals and 27 assists in 70 games — 40 points — at 17:37 a night. Minus-2, 123 shots at 10.6 per cent, five on the power play, three shorthanded, 14 penalty minutes.

And the line this report exists for. He was on the ice for 180 five-on-five draws in the attacking zone and 454 in his own — 28.4 per cent, the 2nd percentile of this book — and came back with 51.3 per cent of the expected goals.

That is the best result relative to deployment on the roster and it is not close. Every forward on this club who posted a share above fifty except him was started in the attacking end.

His ice finished 35-33 against an expectation of 38.43-36.44, across 884 minutes.

Eleven seasons, 636 games, 291 points.

The Finesse Game

123 shots at a median of 19 feet, 51 per cent of them from inside twenty.

Inside twenty: 57 shots on goal and 10 goals, 17.54 per cent, which is the league forward rate to within two-tenths. From twenty to forty: 37 shots and 2 goals. Beyond forty: 24 shots and 1 goal.

So he finishes exactly like an average forward from the only place he shoots, on a shift that starts in his own end three times out of four. Getting to the slot at all from there is the achievement.

84 wrist shots out of 173 tracked attempts, with 21 backhands and 20 tip-ins. 85.2 mph at the 13th percentile, on fourteen slap shots.

The three shorthanded goals are the same skill twice: he reads the play a beat early, and on the kill that is worth more than a shot.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 180, with 14 penalty minutes in seventy games of the hardest deployment in the league.

Top speed 23.0 mph, the 87th percentile; 1.7 bursts a game, the 78th; 2.76 miles a game, the 65th. Genuinely fast, and the tracking backs up what the deployment implies: this is a man who has to skate out of his own end from a standing start, several times a shift, all season.

Offensive-zone ice time 38.3 per cent, the 6th percentile — a second measurement of the same fact, and it is worth having both because they are counting different things.

He kills penalties, wins pucks below his own goal line and does not take penalties doing it. Fourteen penalty minutes on four hundred and fifty-four defensive-zone starts is remarkable.

The Intangibles

Ninety-sixth overall in 2011, the fourth round, out of Ottawa and then a trade to the Islanders at twenty-seven.

134 goals and 157 assists in 636 games, most of it produced from the wrong end of the rink.

He is thirty, and the skating is the part that will go first — which matters more here than for most, because everything he is worth depends on being able to leave his own zone with the puck. While it holds, he is the most useful forward on this roster after Nelson and nobody outside the building says so.