Logan Stankoven

Last Season

Twenty-one goals and 23 assists in 81 games — 44 points, plus-12, at 15:27 a night. Eleven points in his last ten games, seven of them goals.

The Finesse Game

He is the smallest skater in the National Hockey League and he plays like the biggest man on his line, which is the only sentence that really describes him.

The engine is the skating: low, wide, absurdly strong on his edges, and almost impossible to knock off a puck because his centre of gravity is somewhere around a defenceman’s knee. He wins races he should not and then protects the puck with a leverage nobody expects.

The shooting is honest work — 42 per cent of his unblocked attempts from inside twenty feet, median 23, and 20 goals. He goes to the net front at 165 pounds and stands there.

The Physical Game

Five foot eight. A hundred and sixty-five pounds. Those are the numbers and there is no arguing with them: he cannot win a battle by strength and he can be pinned by a defenceman who gets position first.

What he does instead is never stop moving and never be where the hit is. Twenty-five penalty minutes says he gives as much of it back as he can.

The Intangibles

Now the part that matters. He was on the ice for 61.8 per cent of the shot attempts — the hundredth percentile — and 59.2 per cent of the expected goals, 99th. Across 1,116 minutes the goals went 53-32 in his favour.

There is no reading of those numbers that is not extraordinary, and they were posted by a 22-year-old the size of a junior forward on the best possession team in the league.

The honest uncertainty is the one that hangs over every player built like this: a seven-game series against a team that decides to hunt him. Carolina is going to find out, and so is he.