Mark Stone

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

17 goals and 21 assists in 43 games — 38 points — at 19:23 a night. Plus-11, 113 shots at 15.0 per cent, three on the power play, two shorthanded, 10 penalty minutes.

Forty-three games. He has played more than sixty twice in five seasons.

57.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 94th percentile — the best of any forward on this roster — across 630 minutes, with his ice at 35-23 against an expectation of 30.20-22.26.

He started 55.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 73rd percentile.

Six hundred and thirty minutes is half a season, and a 94th-percentile share out of it is still the largest single piece of evidence about him in this edition.

The Finesse Game

113 shots at a median of 16 feet, with 60 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 9 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 70 shots on goal and 15 goals — 21.43 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 30 shots and three goals, 10.00 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 11 shots and no goals.

Seventy of his hundred and eleven shots on goal came from inside twenty feet, which is where a man with a career 15.5 per cent shooting percentage across 584 games should be shooting from.

That career figure is the number to sit with. A 15.5 per cent rate over eleven seasons and 1,262 shots is not luck; it is a man who does not shoot until he is close.

152 tracked attempts, 79 of them wrist shots, 23 tip-ins and five slap. 90.2 mph at the 44th percentile — an ordinary shot, converted at an extraordinary rate because of where he takes it.

He takes the puck off other people’s sticks — the phrase every account of him uses, and the closest this project can come to measuring it is a 94th-percentile chance share on a club whose team share was fifteenth.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 210 pounds, with 10 penalty minutes in 43 games and 193 in 584 career games.

A top speed of 21.0 mph — the 3rd percentile — and 0.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 7th. He covers 2.88 miles a game, the 73rd.

Read that carefully, because it is the most interesting measurement in this chapter. One of the best two-way wingers of his generation, on the largest chance share on his club, is in the bottom three per cent of the league for top speed and effectively never reaches twenty miles an hour — and still covers more ground than three-quarters of it.

Everything he does is done early rather than fast. He reads a play before it develops and puts his stick where the puck is going, and 318 career assists and seven shorthanded goals are the record of it.

He is not fast and, at thirty-one having missed half of two seasons, he is not going to be. The 3rd-percentile figure is partly the injuries and partly him, and this book cannot separate the two.

He is hard to move off a puck along the wall at 6-3, and the strength has never been the question.

The Intangibles

A hundred and seventy-eighth overall in 2010, the sixth round, eleven seasons, 584 games, 514 points across Ottawa and Vegas, the captaincy, and a Stanley Cup.

196 goals and 318 assists at a career 15.5 per cent, and a plus-118.

He is thirty-one, on a long contract, and has played more than sixty games twice in five seasons.

A sixth-round pick with five hundred points, a captaincy and a Cup is one of the great draft-value stories in this book. What the file cannot promise is availability: the chance share says he is among the best players in the league when he is on the ice, and the games-played column says that is about half the time.