Jordan Kyrou

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

37 goals and 36 assists in 79 games — 73 points — at 18:00 a night. Minus-38, 272 shots at 13.6 per cent, eleven on the power play, five game-winners, 22 penalty minutes.

Thirty-seven goals is a career high by ten. The minus-38 is the second-worst figure in this book, behind only Andrew Peeke and level with Seth Jones.

44.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,135 minutes, the 14th percentile, with his ice at 56-72 against an expectation of 44.76-55.71 — eleven goals better than the chances at the good end and sixteen worse at the other.

He started 57.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 83rd percentile.

So the two numbers are both true and they are not in tension. He is a genuinely good scorer whose ice is a disaster area: a 14th-percentile chance share out of an 83rd-percentile deployment is one of the worst combinations on any roster in this edition.

The Finesse Game

272 shots at a median of 29 feet.

From twenty to forty feet: 138 shots on goal and 23 goals — 16.67 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 67 shots and 14 goals, 20.90, above the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 49 shots and one goal.

A hundred and thirty-eight shots on goal from the mid-slot is the sixth-highest count in this book, and half again the league rate on it is where the 37 goals came from.

His career shooting percentage is 13.5 and last season’s was 13.6, so there is no froth here at all. This is a real 35-goal shooter.

359 tracked attempts, 233 of them wrist shots — 64.9 per cent, one of the highest shares in the league — and 28 slap. He shoots off the rush, in stride, without setting his feet, which is why a wrist shot from twenty-eight feet goes in at that rate.

91.2 mph at the 52nd percentile. The shot is ordinary by measurement; the release and the speed he carries into it are not.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 189 pounds, and the skating is the asset: 2.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 90th percentile, a top speed of 22.9 mph at the 81st, and 2.90 miles a game at the 75th.

Above the eightieth percentile on two of the three measures. He is one of the genuinely fast wingers in this edition and everything offensive in the file follows from it.

22 penalty minutes in 79 games and 66 in 252 career games. He is not a physical player and does not defend, and at a 14th-percentile chance share on the club’s first line, that is not a stylistic note — it is the largest single problem in the file.

He does not forecheck with any weight and gives ground along the wall, and a winger who scores 37 goals while his ice concedes sixteen more than the chances predicted is a harder player to build around than the goal total suggests.

The Intangibles

Thirty-fifth overall in 2016, the second round, five seasons, 252 games, 195 points, all of them here.

83 goals and a career 13.5 per cent, with the last two seasons producing 27 and 37 goals.

He is twenty-five, signed long, and the club has just traded Ryan O’Reilly, Vladimir Tarasenko and Ivan Barbashev. He is now the first-line winger on a rebuilding team rather than the third scorer on a good one, and this file is the first season of finding out what that does to the numbers.

The honest summary: the goals are real, the speed is real, and the defensive record is the worst attached to any thirty-goal scorer in this edition.