John Tavares

Last Season

Thirty-one goals and 40 assists in all 82 games — 71 points, minus-28, at 18:11 a night with twelve power-play goals.

His 1,266th career game and his 1,185th point. Five hundred and twenty-five goals.

He turns 36 in September.

The Finesse Game

The shot chart is the reason a thirty-five-year-old scored thirty-one. Fifty-six per cent of his unblocked attempts came from inside twenty feet with a median of seventeen, and only nine per cent from beyond forty.

He does not shoot from the perimeter and has not for years. Three hundred attempts, thirty-one goals, twelve of them on the power play where he lives in the slot and cannot be moved.

Forty assists at 35 is a fine rate.

The Physical Game

Six foot one, 217, and strong through the base — he wins net-front position on the power play against defencemen who know exactly what he is doing. Twenty-eight penalty minutes.

The skating has been the limitation for five years and is now genuinely poor. He cannot recover, and on a club that is chased all night that costs.

The Intangibles

Forty-eight point nine per cent of the expected goals, 44th percentile — and that is the highest figure of any Toronto skater, which is the most damning sentence in this club’s section.

The minus-28 is a full season of playing behind a defence that conceded 206 goals at five-on-five, the second-most in the league.

Fourteen points in his last ten, six of them goals. He is 35, a first overall pick, and still producing at better than a point every two games while the club around him drowns.