Joel Farabee

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

15 goals and 24 assists in 82 games — 39 points — at 17:01 a night. Minus-1, 145 shots at 10.3 per cent, 41 penalty minutes, and no power-play goals at all on a unit that finished last in the league.

45.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 24th percentile — the lowest of any Flyers forward who played a thousand five-on-five minutes — with his ice at 54-52 against an expectation of 43.71-52.25 across 1,121 minutes.

Ten goals better than the chances at the attacking end is the one encouraging number and it is a finishing result rather than a process one.

He started 53.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 64th percentile.

Four seasons, 252 games, 132 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

145 shots at a median of 30 feet, and fifteen goals.

Inside twenty: 52 shots on goal and 10 goals, 19.23 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 55 shots and 5 goals, 9.09 per cent. Beyond forty: 35 shots and none.

An above-average close-range finisher on a low volume of close-range shots, and a quarter of everything he throws comes from beyond forty feet and produces nothing. That distribution is the problem: the goals are where he shoots least.

110 wrist shots out of 192 tracked attempts, with 19 tip-ins and 13 slap. 84.9 mph at the 11th percentile, which on thirteen slap shots is largely a statement about selection and is still the lowest reading of any regular forward on this club.

72 career assists against 60 goals. The passing is the steadier half and 24 assists is the second-best season of four.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 186, with 41 penalty minutes.

Top speed 21.5 mph, the 15th percentile; 0.9 bursts a game, the 48th; 2.72 miles a game, the 62nd.

Bottom sixth of the league in outright speed from a twenty-three-year-old top-six winger, which is the number the whole projection has to be built around.

He goes to the net and takes the punishment, and 158 career penalty minutes from a 186-pound winger says he is in the traffic rather than around it.

What he cannot do is separate. A winger who is not fast and is not heavy has to arrive early, and the 25th-percentile chance share says he does not.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2018, and 252 games and 132 points across four seasons.

The 20 goals in 55 games in 2020-21 is still the best rate of the four, and the point totals since read 34 and 39 on more ice time.

He is twenty-three, signed long, on the worst offensive club in the conference. The file’s honest reading is that a top-six winger in the 15th percentile of measured speed needs the finishing to stay above the league rate every year, and it has been once in four.