Keegan Kolesar

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

8 goals and 10 assists in 74 games — 18 points — at 11:28 a night. Plus-6, 63 shots at 12.7 per cent, 68 penalty minutes.

49.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 838 minutes, the 37th percentile, with his ice at 31-26 against an expectation of 31.34-32.43 — six fewer goals allowed than the chances predicted.

He started 28.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 2nd percentile: 118 attacking draws against 294 defensive ones.

Getting to the 37th percentile out of the second percentile of starts is a good fourth-line season, and eleven and a half minutes a night is what it earns.

The Finesse Game

63 shots at a median of 16 feet, with 57 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 13 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 31 shots on goal and eight goals — 25.81 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 20 shots and none. Beyond forty: nine shots and none.

Every goal from inside twenty feet, on thirty-one shots, which is a small enough sample that the 25.81 means very little. A career 8.8 per cent across 196 games is the honest number.

87 tracked attempts in 74 games — barely more than one a game — and his shot is measured at 84.5 mph, the 10th percentile.

There is no offensive case here at all, and 18 points is about what the role produces.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 216 pounds, with 68 penalty minutes in 74 games and 166 in 196 career games — a rate approaching a penalty minute a game, from a man who plays eleven and a half minutes of it.

Top speed 22.6 mph at the 69th percentile and 1.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 77th, on 1.83 miles a game at the 9th percentile.

That is the shape of a genuine fourth-line forechecker: quick in short spells, on very little ice.

He is punishing and he leads this club in hits by a distance, which is a reading rather than a measurement — this project does not record hits — but the penalty column and the deployment both point the same way.

He is an agitator and he fights, and on a club with the second percentile of zone starts to give somebody, that is the job description.

The Intangibles

Sixty-ninth overall in 2015, the third round, four seasons, 196 games, 55 points, all of them here, and a Stanley Cup.

18 goals and 37 assists, and a minus-4.

He is twenty-six, and has played four seasons of fourth-line hockey on a club that has been good for all of them.

A third-round pick who becomes a useful fourth-liner on a Cup winner has beaten the odds his draft position gave him, and this is a file where the zone-start column tells the reader more than every other number in it combined.