Matty Beniers

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

24 goals and 33 assists in 80 games — 57 points — at 17:06 a night. Plus-14, 148 shots at 16.2 per cent, four on the power play, four game-winners, and 2 penalty minutes.

Two penalty minutes in eighty games, at twenty years old, playing centre. Only Jesper Boqvist, on ten fewer games, matches it among the men in this book who played seventy.

52.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,112 minutes, the 67th percentile, with his ice at 63-41 against an expectation of 46.13-41.50 — seventeen goals more than the chances predicted at the good end.

He started 56.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 78th percentile, which for a rookie first-line centre is the right protection and not much of it.

He won the Calder Trophy.

The Finesse Game

148 shots at a median of 26 feet.

From twenty to forty feet: 63 shots on goal and 13 goals — 20.63 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 59 shots and ten goals, 16.95, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 23 shots and one goal.

That mid-slot figure is the one to look at twice. Thirteen goals from sixty-three shots between twenty and forty feet is nearly double the rate, and on a club that beat its expected goals by forty it is exactly the sort of number that will not repeat in full.

A 16.2 per cent shooting percentage across two seasons and 166 shots. There is no career figure to regress it against yet, which is the honest limit of what can be said about a ninety-game NHL player.

218 tracked attempts, 115 wrist and 28 tip-in, 23 slap. 87.7 mph at the 28th percentile — the shot is not hard and it is going in anyway, which usually means the release and the placement rather than the velocity.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 181 pounds, which is light, and 2.92 miles a game at the 76th percentile at a top speed of 22.6 mph, the 69th, with 1.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 65th.

Above average on every tracking measure and outstanding on none, at twenty. The weight is the part that will change.

Two penalty minutes. A centre who plays seventeen minutes a night against other clubs’ best and takes one minor all season is either extraordinarily disciplined or not engaging, and the 67th-percentile chance share says the first.

He is defensively responsible to a degree that is unusual in a twenty-year-old, which is the single most valuable thing in this file and the reason he was on the ice for the hardest matchups by January.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2021, two seasons, 90 games, 66 points, and the Calder Trophy.

He played ten games at the end of 2021-22 and produced nine points, then 57 in his first full season.

He is twenty. There is very little to say against him and almost nothing yet to be certain about: 90 games at a 16.2 per cent shooting percentage on a club that finished first in the league in finishing is a sample that flatters everybody in it.

What is not sample is the deployment and the discipline. A twenty-year-old playing 17:06 as a first-line centre with two penalty minutes is the description of a player his coach already trusts completely.