Mathew Barzal

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

14 goals and 37 assists in 58 games — 51 points — at 18:43 a night. Plus-5, 139 shots at 10.1 per cent, five game-winners, 22 penalty minutes.

And then the number that defines the chapter. He was on the ice for 305 five-on-five faceoffs in the attacking zone and 94 in his own: 76.4 per cent, the highest share of any man in this book who played six hundred five-on-five minutes.

What came back was 52.9 per cent of the expected goals, the 73rd percentile. That is a good number and it is a long way short of what the deployment paid for. His ice finished 39-22 against an expectation of 36.48-32.45 — ten goals better than the chances at the defensive end, which is Sorokin rather than Barzal.

Seven seasons, 420 games, 362 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

139 shots at a median of 28 feet, and 14 goals.

Inside twenty: 46 shots on goal and 8 goals, 17.39 per cent, which is the league forward rate. From twenty to forty: 67 shots and 7 goals, 10.45 per cent. Beyond forty: 27 shots and none.

So the shooting is exactly average from close and slightly below it from range, on a low volume for a first-line centre. The scoring is not the asset and this book will not pretend otherwise: 105 goals in 420 games against 257 assists.

128 wrist shots out of 195 tracked attempts and only 20 slap. 87.0 mph at the 22nd percentile, on that count, so the reading is about what he chooses.

The passing is the whole file, and it is genuinely elite. He carries the puck into the zone himself, holds it until a lane opens, and 37 assists in fifty-eight games is the sixth season out of seven at that rate.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 186, with 22 penalty minutes.

Top speed 23.7 mph, the 98th percentile. 4.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 99th. 3.15 miles a game, the 87th.

That is the 12th-highest top speed and the 7th-highest burst rate of the 574 skaters in this book who played forty games, and unlike most men in that company he uses it to carry rather than to chase.

He does not take the body, does not win pucks along the wall, and gives the puck up when he is met with contact. On a club built on Cizikas, Martin and Clutterbuck, he is the one forward who plays no part of that game at all.

What the deployment says is that the club knows it. You do not give a man three hundred and five attacking-zone draws and ninety-four of the other kind unless you have decided what he is for.

The Intangibles

Sixteenth overall in 2015, an 85-point rookie season, and nothing since above 62.

The career line is 105 goals and 257 assists in 420 games, which is a first-line playmaker’s record, and 58 games is the fewest he has played in a full season.

He is twenty-six. What the file cannot settle is whether the 52.9 per cent chance share from the softest deployment in the league is a ceiling or a consequence of the men he has been given to play with, and the club has now spent seven seasons not answering it.