Jeff Carter

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 16 assists in 79 games — 29 points — at 13:42 a night. Minus-16, 139 shots at 9.4 per cent, four on the power play, two game-winners, 30 penalty minutes.

48.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 871 minutes, the 31st percentile, the lowest of any Pittsburgh forward who played eight hundred minutes, with his ice at 24-41 against an expectation of 32.30-34.86.

He started 27.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone. That is the 2nd percentile, and the ninth-lowest share of the 525 skaters in this book. 161 attacking draws against 420 defensive ones.

So the record has to be read against the assignment. A minus-16 out of that deployment on a club that finished last in the league in finishing is not the same number as a minus-16 from the second line.

The Finesse Game

139 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 53 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 17 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 66 shots on goal and twelve goals — 18.18 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 43 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: 22 shots and no goals.

Twelve of his thirteen goals came from inside twenty feet, and sixty-five shots on goal from outside it produced nothing whatever. At thirty-eight that is not a slump; it is a description of what is left.

He still takes the shots. Thirty-five of his 184 tracked attempts are tip-ins, 19 per cent, so the close-range volume is generated the way a thirty-eight-year-old has to generate it — by standing in front of the goaltender.

91.7 mph at the 56th percentile, on seven slap shots. The shot that scored 46 goals in 2008-09 is still measurable and is no longer the reason he is on the roster.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 219 pounds. Top speed 22.8 mph at the 78th percentile and 1.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 75th, on 2.20 miles a game at the 24th.

That is a genuinely surprising line for a man of thirty-eight: he still reaches a speed three-quarters of the league does not, and he does it in short bursts on very little total ground. The straight-line speed was always the asset and it is the last thing to go.

30 penalty minutes in 79 games and 623 in 1,249 career games. He has never been a physical centre and is not one now; the size is used to protect the puck and to stand in the crease.

He kills penalties, and 19 career shorthanded goals is the record of somebody who has done it for eighteen years.

The Intangibles

Eleventh overall in 2003, eighteen seasons, 1,249 games, 431 goals, 836 points, and two Stanley Cups in Los Angeles.

88 game-winning goals. The peak is a long way back — 46 goals in 2008-09, 36 in 2010-11, 32 in 2016-17 — and the last four seasons read 27, 30, 45 and 29 points.

He is thirty-eight, on the fourth line, taking the hardest starts on the roster, and doing it as well as anyone would have a right to expect. The reason this file matters to Pittsburgh is not what he produces but where he is used: every defensive-zone draw he takes is one Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin do not.

That is a real service and it is the last one he has left to sell.