Logan Couture

Twenty-seven goals at thirty-three, and a fourteenth season of the same rate.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2009-10	SJS	25	5	4	9	+4	6	1	0	1	42	11.9	10:16
2010-11	SJS	79	32	24	56	+18	41	10	0	8	253	12.7	17:49
2011-12	SJS	80	31	34	65	+2	16	11	2	5	245	12.7	18:34
2012-13	SJS	48	21	16	37	+7	4	7	0	5	151	13.9	18:06
2013-14	SJS	65	23	31	54	+21	20	4	2	6	233	9.9	18:56
2014-15	SJS	82	27	40	67	-6	12	6	2	4	263	10.3	19:04
2015-16	SJS	52	15	21	36	+2	20	5	0	4	137	10.9	17:23
2016-17	SJS	73	25	27	52	+11	12	11	0	3	174	14.4	17:36
2017-18	SJS	78	34	27	61	-2	18	10	2	4	204	16.7	18:33
2018-19	SJS	81	27	43	70	-6	22	6	2	3	204	13.2	18:36
2019-20	SJS	52	16	23	39	0	18	0	0	3	126	12.7	18:32
2020-21	SJS	53	17	14	31	-11	25	2	1	2	114	14.9	19:16
2021-22	SJS	77	23	33	56	-11	18	5	2	3	199	11.6	18:56
2022-23	SJS	82	27	40	67	-30	19	5	1	4	198	13.6	19:08
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	927	323	377	700	-1	251	83	14	55	2543	12.7	18:18

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

27 goals and 40 assists in 82 games — 67 points — at 19:08 a night. Minus-30, 198 shots at 13.6 per cent, five on the power play, one shorthanded, four game-winners, 19 penalty minutes.

He played all 82 for the second time in fourteen seasons, at thirty-three.

48.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,066 minutes, the 34th percentile, with his ice at 51-62 against an expectation of 44.66-46.71. Six goals better than the chances at the good end and fifteen worse at the other, which is the goaltending record rather than his.

He started 44.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 27th percentile — the harder half of the forward assignments on a club that had nothing easy to give out.

The Finesse Game

198 shots at a median of 20 feet, with 47 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 93 shots on goal and 17 goals — 18.28 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 65 shots and seven goals, 10.77, against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 39 shots and two goals, 5.13, above the 4.16 rate for a forward.

At or above the league rate from all three distances, on a hundred and ninety-seven shots on goal. That is a rarer thing than it sounds and it is the reason 67 points arrived on a team that scored 234 goals.

278 tracked attempts: 159 wrist, 33 tip-in, 28 backhand, 25 slap. 91.4 mph at the 55th percentile.

The career shooting percentage is 12.7 and last season’s was 13.6, so there is very little froth in the goal total. He has scored twenty-three or more in nine of fourteen seasons and the method has not changed once.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 206 pounds, with 19 penalty minutes in 82 games and 251 in 927 career games — a remarkably clean record for a centre who plays this much.

3.08 miles a game at the 84th percentile at a top speed of 21.9 mph, the 34th, with 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 59th.

High mileage from a modest top end at thirty-three, which is the shape of a man who takes long shifts and never stops moving inside them rather than one who beats anybody wide.

He kills penalties and has fourteen career shorthanded goals. The defensive work has always been part of the file and it is the reason the club uses him against the other team’s best at the hard end of the rink.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2007, fourteen seasons, 927 games, 700 points, all of them in one uniform, and the captaincy.

323 goals. The consistency is the story: nine seasons of twenty-three goals or more, no season above 34, and a points-per-game figure that has been between 0.70 and 0.90 in nine of the last eleven.

He is thirty-four on a club that has traded its Norris-winning defenceman and is starting over, and he is the captain of it. That is an awkward fit and it is nobody’s fault.

What this file records is a genuinely good two-way centre in the last useful third of a career, playing the hardest minutes on the worst team he has been part of, and producing at exactly his career rate while doing it.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He kills penalties and has fourteen career shorthanded goals.”
leadershipa strength· the room, and who holds it
“**Ninth overall in 2007**, fourteen seasons, 927 games, 700 points, all of them in one uniform, and the captaincy.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,066 minutes

Expected goals: 48.9%; 42nd pct
Shot attempts: 47.6%; 35th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 51 for, 62 against. Expected: 44.7 and 46.7.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

92nd

Numbers

42nd

The report ranks him 50 points above where the numbers do. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 78 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 82 games

Top speed: 21.9 mph; 43rd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.10 a game
Distance: 3.08 miles a game
Hardest shot: 91.4 mph; 76th pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 1066 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2022-23

The club: SJS took 48.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 48.9% — 0.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,066 minutes at five-on-five — 66th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Alexander Barabanov	51.5%	43.7%	43.0%
Erik Karlsson	55.5%	42.7%	49.5%
Marc-Edouard Vlasic	49.9%	48.4%	50.0%

51.5% together, 43.7% for him apart and 43.0% for Barabanov apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

278 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 26 of them goals. His median goal came from 16 feet. 50% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.