Michael McLeod

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

4 goals and 22 assists in 80 games — 26 points — at 12:15 a night. Plus-6, 90 shots at 4.4 per cent, 43 penalty minutes.

Twenty-two assists on four goals is the shape of the whole file.

51.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 63rd percentile, with his ice at 34-30 against an expectation of 38.81-36.61 across 874 minutes.

And the deployment: 217 attacking-zone draws against 392 in his own end — 35.6 per cent, the 7th percentile of this book. New Jersey started this line in its own end and asked it to get out, and a 51.5 per cent chance share out of that is a good result rather than an ordinary one.

Five seasons, 242 games, 66 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

90 shots at a median of 24 feet, and four goals in eighty games at 4.4 per cent.

Inside twenty: 34 shots on goal, 2 goals. Twenty to forty: 28 shots, 1 goal. Beyond forty: 21 shots, 1 goal. There is no band where anything happens.

80.8 mph at the 2nd percentile of measured shot speed, on six slap shots out of 122 tracked attempts — which is a statement about a man who never winds up, and in his case the wrist shot is not much of a substitute.

59 wrist shots and 21 backhands. The backhand count is the tell: this is a player working below the goal line and out of the corners rather than one setting up to shoot.

22 assists from a fourth-line centre is real and it is the only offensive thing in the file.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 190, with 43 penalty minutes.

2.5 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 92nd percentile — and 2.06 miles a game, the 19th. Top speed 23.0 mph, the 85th.

That combination is worth pausing on. He is near the top of the league in how often he reaches full speed and near the bottom in total ground covered, which is what twelve minutes a night of short, hard shifts looks like when it is measured: the mileage is low because the ice time is, and the sprints per minute are enormous.

He forechecks at speed, kills penalties, and starts every shift in his own end. That is the job and the tracking says he does it at full effort.

The Intangibles

Twelfth overall in 2016, and 66 points in 242 games five seasons later.

That is a first-round pick who has become a fourth-line centre, and the honest reading of the file is that this is now what he is rather than a step towards something else.

What makes him useful is narrow and genuine: he is the man this club sends out when the puck is in the wrong end, he is fast enough to chase it down, and the chance share says the shifts do not go backwards.