Kyle Connor

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

31 goals and 49 assists in 82 games — 80 points — at 20:32 a night. Minus-11, 273 shots at 11.4 per cent, eight on the power play, eight game-winners, 20 penalty minutes.

31 goals follows 47 the season before, and 80 points follows 93.

51.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,268 minutes, the 59th percentile, with his ice at 60-59 against an expectation of 58.09-54.26.

He started 62.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 94th percentile: 470 attacking draws against 287 defensive ones.

A 59th-percentile chance share out of the 94th percentile of starts is the same complaint the club’s whole first line invites, and a minus-11 from an eighty-point winger is what it looks like in the box score.

The Finesse Game

273 shots at a median of 27 feet, and 379 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 89 shots on goal and 10 goals — 11.24 per cent, well below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 150 shots and 21 goals, 14.00 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 35 shots and no goals.

Read those two together, because they are inverted. He was well below the league rate from close range and well above it from the mid-slot, on a hundred and fifty shots on goal — the fourth-largest mid-slot volume in this book. A forward who converts better from thirty feet than from fifteen is not describing a skill; he is describing one season.

A career 14.5 per cent across 466 games against 11.4 last season. On 273 shots that difference is about eight goals, which is the gap between thirty-one and thirty-nine, and most of it sits in the close-range band.

218 of his 379 attempts are wrist shots — a 57.5 per cent share — and 43 are slap. 92.3 mph at the 61st percentile.

209 goals in 466 career games, with five seasons above thirty and one at forty-seven.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 183 pounds, with 20 penalty minutes in 82 games and 108 in 466 career games — a fifth of a penalty minute a game across seven seasons.

2.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 88th percentile and 3.33 miles a game at the 94th, at a top speed of 22.7 mph, the 70th. A genuinely strong tracking line for a scoring winger.

He gets to a loose puck first and he does it constantly, which is where a 379-attempt season comes from at twenty minutes a night.

He is not physical and at 183 pounds cannot be. There is no forechecking in this file and no wall play either; everything is done with speed and a stick.

A hundred and eight penalty minutes in seven seasons from a first-line winger is a very low rate.

The Intangibles

Seventeenth overall in 2015, seven seasons, 466 games, 424 points, all of them here.

209 goals and 215 assists at a career 14.5 per cent, and a minus-20.

He is twenty-six, on a long contract, and he has scored two hundred goals before his twenty-seventh birthday.

The scoring is not in question and the rest of the shift has never once been good. A minus-20 across seven seasons on clubs that have mostly made the playoffs, out of the 94th percentile of starts, is a pattern rather than a season, and it is the reason a winger this productive is not discussed among the game’s best.