John Tavares

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

36 goals and 44 assists in 80 games — 80 points — at 17:39 a night. Minus-7, 277 shots at 13.0 per cent, eighteen on the power play, nine game-winners, 34 penalty minutes.

36 goals is his most since the 47 he scored in 2018-19, and eighteen power-play goals is tied for the sixth-highest total in this book.

55.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,073 minutes, the 86th percentile, with his ice at 52-46 against an expectation of 51.73-41.68 — almost exactly the goals the chances predicted at the good end, and four more than they predicted at the other.

He started 55.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 77th percentile.

The Finesse Game

277 shots at a median of 16 feet, with 60 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet and 9 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 173 shots on goal and 27 goals — 15.61 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 80 shots and eight goals, 10.00 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 23 shots and one goal.

A hundred and seventy-three shots on goal from inside twenty feet is the fifth-highest count in the league, behind Connor McDavid, Zach Hyman and the two Tkachuks, and it is the whole of the file: he takes more shots from the slot than all but four men in the league and converts them at a shade below the league rate.

392 tracked attempts, 72 of them tip-ins — an 18.4 per cent share — and eight wrap-arounds. Eleven slap shots in a season.

86.7 mph at the 20th percentile. The shot is soft, the median is sixteen feet, and the goals arrive from a stick’s length.

A 13.0 per cent shooting percentage against a career 13.1 across 1,029 games. There is no froth here at all.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 217 pounds, with 34 penalty minutes in 80 games and 445 in 1,029 career games.

Top speed 22.0 mph at the 36th percentile, 1.0 bursts above twenty a game at the 56th, 2.66 miles a game at the 57th. An unremarkable tracking line at thirty-three, and it has never been the point.

He wins his position in front of the net and does not give it up, which at 217 pounds against defencemen is what a sixteen-foot median and 72 tip-ins actually require.

He is not fast and has not been for some time. The game is played standing still, in the most contested six feet on the ice.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2009, fourteen seasons, 1,029 games, 975 points across the Islanders and Toronto, and the captaincy.

427 goals at a career 13.1 per cent, and 134 power-play goals. He has scored thirty or more in six seasons.

He is thirty-three, on a club with two forty-goal wingers and a Hart-winning centre, playing the second-line centre job and scoring more power-play goals than any of them.

A minus-33 for a career belongs almost entirely to nine seasons on Long Island. The 86th-percentile chance share is the number that describes last season.