Kaapo Kakko

Last Season

Thirteen goals and 27 assists in 65 games — 40 points, plus-14, at 14:15 a night with fourteen penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

Better hands than the career has advertised. A hundred and twenty-two unblocked attempts, thirteen goals, median 23 feet with 45 per cent from inside twenty — good ice and a good conversion off low volume.

Twenty-seven assists in fourteen minutes a night is the best rate on the club and the most encouraging thing on this page. Two hundred and one points in 444 career games.

The Physical Game

Six foot one, 215 pounds, and heavier than he plays. Fourteen penalty minutes.

He protects the puck well below the goal line and can win a wall exchange when he chooses to, and the recurring criticism across seven seasons has been that he does not choose to often enough.

The Intangibles

Forty-four point five per cent of the expected goals, 12th percentile, and 46.2 per cent of the shot attempts, 19th, across 831 minutes, with the goals 30-40 against.

The plus-14 comes from special teams and from a goaltending group that beat its chances by sixteen and a half goals; the five-on-five ice was under water.

Ten points in his last ten. He is 25, the second pick in a draft where the first was Jack Hughes, and the word bust has followed him since he was twenty. Forty points in sixty-five games at fourteen minutes is not that. It is a good third-line winger who has never once been used like one.