This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Jesperi Kotkaniemi

A career high at 23, and the offer sheet finally looks like a transaction rather than a stunt.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2018-19	MTL	79	11	23	34	+1	26	1	0	2	134	8.2	13:44
2019-20	MTL	36	6	2	8	-11	23	1	0	0	55	10.9	13:00
2020-21	MTL	56	5	15	20	-1	12	0	0	1	87	5.8	14:48
2021-22	CAR	66	12	17	29	+3	37	0	0	3	81	14.8	12:01
2022-23	CAR	82	18	25	43	+10	50	3	1	2	129	14.0	14:44
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	319	52	82	134	+2	148	5	1	8	486	10.7	13:44

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

18 goals and 25 assists in 82 games — 43 points at 14:44 a night, plus-10, with 50 penalty minutes on 129 shots at 13.95 per cent. It is a career high, past the 34 points he managed as an 18-year-old in Montreal.

57.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,047 minutes, the 94th percentile. His ice went 43-32 against an expectation of 43.87-32.41, which lands almost exactly on the forecast at both ends — on this club, that is close to the best outcome available.

Carolina signed him to an offer sheet in 2021 and Montreal did not match it.

The Finesse Game

129 attempts at a median of 21 feet, 46 per cent from inside twenty and 18 per cent from beyond forty. Eleven goals on 61 shots from inside twenty at 18.0 per cent, five from the middle band, and two on sixteen shots from beyond forty at 12.5 per cent — which is a small enough number of shots to mean nothing and is still the second-best long-range rate on the club.

13.95 per cent overall on 129 shots is a good return and it is the sort of rate that does not survive unchanged. What should survive is the shot selection: a 23-year-old centre taking nearly half his shots from inside twenty feet has found the part of the job that pays.

52 goals in 319 games is a modest career line and the trajectory inside it is the point.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 212 with 50 penalty minutes, and he has grown into the frame he was drafted with.

2.41 miles a game at the 38th percentile and 22.4 mph at the 58th. Neither number is a strength and neither is a problem at fourteen minutes a night in a third-line role.

The Intangibles

Third overall in 2018, a disappointment in Montreal by 20, and an offer sheet that was reported at the time as a piece of front-office theatre.

Two seasons later he is a 23-year-old with a career-high 43 points playing behind Aho and Staal. He is not the third-overall pick anyone imagined and he is a genuinely useful third centre, which on a club this deep is what was needed.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,047 minutes

Expected goals: 57.5%; 94th pct
Shot attempts: 60.5%; 98th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 43 for, 32 against. Expected: 43.9 and 32.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

66th

Numbers

94th

The numbers rank him 28 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

Both bars are percentiles among the 120 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 66 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 1047 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2022-23

The club: CAR took 58.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 57.5% — 1.4 below the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,047 minutes at five-on-five — 63rd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Martin Necas	54.7%	60.2%	56.3%
Andrei Svechnikov	53.0%	60.0%	64.2%
Brent Burns	61.6%	55.5%	59.5%

54.7% together, 60.2% for him apart and 56.3% for Necas apart. He was better away from Necas, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Necas.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

174 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 18 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 47% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.