Kailer Yamamoto

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

10 goals and 15 assists in 58 games — 25 points — at 16:35 a night for Edmonton. Plus-12, 97 shots at 10.3 per cent, one shorthanded, three game-winners, 24 penalty minutes.

53 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 836 minutes, the 71st percentile, with his ice at 40-30 against an expectation of 39.21-34.73.

He started 51.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 51st percentile.

He missed twenty-four games, and 25 points is well short of the 41 he recorded the season before.

The Finesse Game

97 shots at a median of 16 feet, with 62 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 4 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 60 shots on goal and nine goals — 15.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 32 shots and one goal, 3.13 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: five shots and none.

Below the rate from both bands he shoots from, on ninety-two shots on goal.

30 of his 117 tracked attempts are tip-ins — a 25.6 per cent share, the third-highest of the 477 forwards in this book who took a hundred attempts, behind only Chris Kreider and Anders Lee, and he does it on a third of their volume.

So the shot chart is unambiguous: a 5-9 winger who generates almost everything within a stick’s length of the goaltender, and converts a little under the league rate when he gets there.

86.2 mph at the 18th percentile. There is no shot here and there does not need to be at sixteen feet.

The Physical Game

5-9 and 178 pounds, with 24 penalty minutes in 58 games and 106 in 244 career games.

Top speed 22.0 mph at the 37th percentile, 1.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 64th, 2.51 miles a game at the 44th. An ordinary tracking line, which for a man his size playing sixteen minutes a night is itself the finding.

He goes to the net front at 178 pounds and stays there, which is where thirty tip-ins come from and is the single most improbable thing in this file.

He forechecks into contact and does not come out of it well, and the games missed are the price: he has played more than sixty games once in six seasons.

The Intangibles

Twenty-second overall in 2017, six seasons, 244 games, 118 points, all of them in Edmonton until this summer.

50 goals and a career 13.9 per cent shooting percentage. The 41 points in 2021-22 is the best season and the 26 points he recorded in 27 games in 2019-20 are the ones everybody remembers.

He is twenty-five, arriving on a club that plays four lines and does not need him to be a top-six winger.

What the file records is a small, willing net-front winger who has spent six years next to Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, and whose numbers have never been separable from theirs. Seattle is the first place they will be.