Joe Pavelski

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

28 goals and 49 assists in all 82 games, plus-42 — fourth-best in the league — at 17:43 a night, on 184 shots at 15.2 per cent. He was 38 all season.

57.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 94th percentile, and his ice went 71-35 against an expectation of 56.45-41.54. Fifteen goals better than the chances at the offensive end and six better at the defensive one — the best pair of numbers on the club.

Seventeen seasons, 1,250 games, 449 goals and 1,001 points, from the 205th pick of the 2003 draft.

The Finesse Game

184 shots at a median of 16 feet, 62 per cent from inside twenty and 8 per cent from beyond forty — the most extreme close-range distribution of any forward in these five chapters.

Inside forty: 175 shots, 28 goals, 16.00 per cent. Beyond forty: 14 shots, one.

And the shot-type record is the report: 41 tip-ins and 12 deflections out of 184 attempts. Nearly a third of everything he put on net was a redirection of somebody else’s shot. Nobody else in these chapters is close, and it is a skill he has been building a Hall-of-Fame case on for fifteen years.

87.2 mph at the 24th percentile. He has never needed a shot, because the puck is already travelling when he touches it.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 196. 21.5 mph at the 12th percentile with 0.2 bursts over twenty a game at the 7th — he is among the slowest forwards in the league and he is 38, and both of those were true when he scored 27 goals the year before.

2.92 miles a game at the 75th percentile. The distance is there; the pace is gone.

8 penalty minutes in 82 games. That is one of the lowest figures in the entire edition for a forward playing eighteen minutes a night. He does not take penalties, does not retaliate and does not need to be anywhere he cannot get to.

The Intangibles

205th overall in 2003 — the seventh round — out of Plover, Wisconsin, by way of the USHL and Wisconsin.

Thirteen seasons in San Jose, four in Dallas, a thousand points, and a career that is the strongest argument in this book against the idea that the draft knows anything after the second round.

He is 39 in July and coming off 77 points and a Conference Final. Everything about the tracking says it should have stopped. It has not.