Kaapo Kakko

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

18 goals and 22 assists in 82 games — 40 points — at 15:18 a night. Plus-12, 125 shots at 14.4 per cent, and eight penalty minutes in eighty-two games.

50.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 58th percentile, with his ice at 52-42 against an expectation of 47.81-46.32 across 1,144 minutes.

He started 53.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 67th percentile.

Four seasons, 239 games, 98 points.

The Finesse Game

125 shots at a median of 18 feet, 52 per cent of them from inside twenty, and eighteen goals.

Inside twenty feet: 64 shots on goal and 16 goals — 25.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 44 shots and 3 goals, 6.82 per cent. Beyond forty: 17 shots and 1 goal.

Sixteen of eighteen goals from inside twenty at a quarter of what he throws from there. That is a genuinely good close-range rate on a real sample, and it is the first evidence in four seasons that the finishing is going to be a professional asset.

102 wrist shots out of 176 tracked attempts, six slap. 93.5 mph at the 67th percentile, on six slap shots, so it says nothing.

22 assists in eighty-two games. The passing is adequate and the file does not run through it.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 215, with eight penalty minutes.

Top speed 23.0 mph, the 85th percentile — and 0.4 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 22nd. 2.31 miles a game, the 32nd.

That pair of numbers is the whole scouting question about him in two figures. He is genuinely fast and reaches for it once every two and a half games.

At 215 pounds he protects the puck well below the goal line and is difficult to strip along the wall, which is the part of the physical game that has arrived.

What has not is anything that looks like urgency. Eight penalty minutes across a full season from a 215-pound winger is not discipline; it is a man who is never in the middle of anything.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2019, behind Jack Hughes, and 98 points in 239 games four seasons later.

The progression reads 23 points, 17, 18 and 40, and the fourth of those is the first that looks like a top-six forward.

He is twenty-two, and the file now has one real asset — a 25 per cent close-range conversion on sixty-four shots — and one real absence. Everything depends on whether a man who can skate at 23 miles an hour decides to do it more than twice a game.