Luke Evangelista

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

7 goals and 8 assists in 24 games — 15 points — at 16:34 a night. Plus-7, 54 shots at 13.0 per cent, six penalty minutes, one game-winner.

Fifteen points in twenty-four games at twenty-one is a fifty-point pace and it needs its deployment attached immediately.

He started 69.6 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone — 110 attacking draws against 48 defensive ones, the 99th percentile in the league. Almost nobody in the sport is given that, and it was given to a rookie.

44.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 17th percentile, with his ice at 18-11 against an expectation of 12.50-15.71 across 303 minutes. A 17th-percentile chance share from a 99th-percentile zone start is the worst combination in this chapter, and 303 minutes is not enough to convict him of it.

One season, 24 games, 15 points.

The Finesse Game

54 shots at a median of 18 feet, 54 per cent from inside twenty and 14 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 8 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 45 shots, 7 goals, 15.56 per cent.

Fifty-four shots in twenty-four games is 2.25 a night, which is a real rate, and the median of eighteen feet is a good shot chart. Both are the encouraging half of the file.

78.5 mph at the 1st percentile. He took one slap shot in the tracked sample, so the number is recording a choice rather than a limit. It is still the lowest figure here and it belongs in the file.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 183, and six penalty minutes in 24 games.

Top speed 21.1 mph, the 5th percentile. Bursts 0.5 a game, the 27th; 2.46 miles a game, the 40th.

That is a slow reading for a twenty-one-year-old winger and it is the number that makes the 99th-percentile zone start necessary rather than generous.

He is not physical, does not forecheck the first man and does not win pucks on the wall. The game is played with anticipation and passing.

The Intangibles

Forty-second overall in 2020 out of London, and 15 points in his first twenty-four NHL games.

The temptation is to read fifteen points in twenty-four games as a breakout. The zone starts say Nashville built a runway for him and the chance share says he did not use it, and twenty-four games settles neither.

What this book would want next is the same player at fifty per cent zone starts. The 5th-percentile top speed is the reason to be cautious about what that looks like.