Mark Scheifele

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

42 goals and 26 assists in 81 games — 68 points — at 20:29 a night. Minus-16, 206 shots at 20.4 per cent, twelve on the power play, ten game-winners, 43 penalty minutes.

42 goals is a career high by four, and ten game-winning goals is the fourth-most in this book.

50.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,273 minutes, the 49th percentile, with his ice at 56-55 against an expectation of 57.13-56.54.

He started 60.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 92nd percentile: 477 attacking draws against 312 defensive ones.

A dead-even chance share out of the 92nd percentile of starts, and a minus-16, from a first-line centre. That is the argument against him, it has been the argument against him for a decade, and forty-two goals is the argument for.

The Finesse Game

206 shots at a median of 22 feet, and 301 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 88 shots on goal and 25 goals — 28.41 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 101 shots and 18 goals, 17.82 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 18 shots and no goals.

More than half again the positional rate from both bands that carry his volume, on a hundred and eighty-nine shots on goal. That is not a fluke of a season: a career 16.79 per cent across 723 games is the fourth-highest of the 294 skaters in this book with four hundred or more career games, behind Leon Draisaitl, Brayden Point and Ivan Barbashev.

So the finishing is a genuine, durable, measurable skill and it is one of the four best in the league. The 20.4 last season is above even his own line and will come down; 16.8 is the floor and it is extraordinary.

50 tip-ins out of 301 attempts is a 16.6 per cent share, and his shot is measured at 94.3 mph, the 74th percentile.

272 goals in 723 career games.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 207 pounds, with 43 penalty minutes in 81 games and 303 in 723 career games.

3.28 miles a game at the 93rd percentile, at a top speed of 22.7 mph, the 73rd, with 1.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 67th. A very good tracking line, and it is the part of the file nobody disputes.

So the skating is not the reason the chance share sits at even out of the 92nd percentile of starts.

He does not track back and he leaves the zone early, which is the oldest criticism in his file and the one the expected-goals column keeps agreeing with.

He is not physical and at 207 pounds on a first line does not need to be. The whole of the value is what happens in the eighteen feet in front of the other goaltender.

The Intangibles

Seventh overall in 2011, twelve seasons, 723 games, 645 points, all of them here.

272 goals and 373 assists at a career 16.8 per cent, and a plus-46.

He is thirty, on a club that has just lost in the first round again.

A first-line centre with one of the four best finishing rates in the league and a chance share that has never matched his deployment is a genuinely difficult player to value, and Winnipeg has been trying to for a decade. The goals are real. So is the minus-16.