Kevin Hayes

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 36 assists in 81 games — 54 points — at 17:34 a night for Philadelphia. Minus-22, 209 shots at 8.6 per cent, six on the power play, one game-winner, 23 penalty minutes.

54 points is his best total since the 55 he recorded in 2018-19.

48.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,149 minutes, the 32nd percentile, with his ice at 45-51 against an expectation of 48.62-51.57 — four goals short at the good end and almost exactly on the number at the other.

He started 53.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 68th percentile.

The Finesse Game

209 shots at a median of 29 feet, and the distribution is unusually flat: 66 shots on goal from inside twenty feet, 57 from the mid-slot, and 66 from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 66 shots on goal and seven goals — 10.61 per cent, well below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 57 shots and six goals, 10.53 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 66 shots and three goals, 4.55, above the league rate of 4.16.

Below the rate from close range by a long way, on sixty-six shots. An 8.6 per cent shooting percentage against a career 11.5 across 634 games.

Sixty-six shots on goal from beyond forty feet is a very high number for a forward — a quarter of his volume — and it is the tell of a player who is no longer getting to the places he used to.

295 tracked attempts, 27 of them slap. 93.2 mph at the 66th percentile.

The 36 assists are where the value sits: he is a 6-3 centre who holds the puck on the half-wall and waits, and the vision has never been the problem.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 217 pounds, and the skating is the file: a top speed of 21.1 mph at the 5th percentile and 0.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 11th. He covers 2.75 miles a night at the 63rd.

That is a bottom-decile skater playing seventeen and a half minutes a night on the top six, and it is the most straightforward explanation available for a minus-22 and for sixty-six shots from beyond forty feet.

23 penalty minutes in 81 games and 205 in 634 career games — a low rate for a man his size.

He protects the puck rather than pursuing it. At 217 pounds on the half-wall he is very hard to take it from, and at the 5th percentile of top speed he is very rarely the one who gets there first.

Ten career shorthanded goals. He kills penalties and reads the box well enough that the feet do not matter as much there.

The Intangibles

Twenty-fourth overall in 2010, nine seasons, 634 games, 386 points across the Rangers, Winnipeg and Philadelphia.

155 goals and 231 assists, with the 55-point season in 2018-19 the peak and four seasons since between 31 and 54.

He is thirty-one, arriving on a club that has just sold off three top-six forwards and needs somebody to play a middle-six centre’s minutes.

What the file describes is a large, skilled, slow forward whose production is real and whose on-ice record has been negative in Philadelphia for four straight seasons. Both halves of that are stable and neither is going to change at thirty-one.