Matthew Tkachuk

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

40 goals and 69 assists in 79 games — 109 points, seventh in the league — with 123 penalty minutes. Plus-29, 20:26 a night, 322 shots at 12.4 per cent.

He is the only player in the National Hockey League with a hundred points and a hundred penalty minutes. Only one other man reached ninety of one and eighty of the other, and that was Rantanen at 105 and 82.

60.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 98th percentile, with his ice at 89-50 against an expectation of 74.51-48.61. That plus-39 is the third-best on-ice goal differential in the league, behind two Boston defencemen and ahead of everyone else.

It was his first season in Florida after six in Calgary, where he had already put up 104 points the year before. Two straight hundred-point seasons in two different buildings is the answer to the question of whether the first one was the room.

Seven seasons, 510 games, 491 points.

The Finesse Game

322 shots at a median of 15 feet, 58 per cent from inside twenty and 12 per cent from beyond forty. That is the closest median shot of any Panther and one of the closest in this book.

From beyond forty feet he took forty shots on goal all season and scored one. Inside forty: 272 shots, 37 goals, 13.60 per cent.

He scores from the paint, and 38 of his tracked shots were tip-ins — the second-largest tip-in count on the club. This is a hundred-point season assembled almost entirely inside the dots.

87.1 mph at the 23rd percentile. The registered shot is a slap-shot measurement and he took sixteen slap shots all year, so it says less about him than it does about most; what it does say is that none of this comes from the shot itself.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 202, and 123 penalty minutes, fifth in the league.

The tracking is where he becomes strange. Top speed 21.9 mph, the 27th percentile. Bursts 0.1 per game, the 2nd percentile — he registered one burst of speed roughly every ten games. For comparison, the two men above him in scoring register six and seven a night.

2.94 miles a game, the 77th percentile. He covers ground; he never covers it quickly.

What this describes is a player who arrives where the puck is going to be rather than chasing it there, and who is willing to stand in the traffic once he arrives. He finishes checks, he talks, and he draws the response — the penalty minutes are as much what he provokes as what he commits.

The Intangibles

57.4 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 83rd percentile, so the deployment was favourable and the plus-39 should be read against that.

He was sixth overall in 2016 out of London, the elder of Keith Tkachuk’s two sons in this league, and the one who plays most like his father.

The honest reservation is that a 98th-percentile chance share and a plus-39 on the same ice invites the question of which produced which. Here the expected goals say 74.51-48.61 and the scoreboard said 89-50 — a fifteen-goal finishing surplus at the offensive end. Some of that is him. This book cannot say how much.