Mika Zibanejad

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

39 goals and 52 assists in 82 games — 91 points — at 19:58 a night. Plus-25, 251 shots at 15.5 per cent, twenty of the goals on the power play, one shorthanded, five game-winners.

Twenty power-play goals on a unit that finished second in the league in expected goals per sixty.

49 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 43rd percentile, with his ice at 51-34 against an expectation of 45.76-47.58 — thirteen and a half goals better than the chances at the defensive end, which is Shesterkin, and five better at the attacking, which is him.

He started 48.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 38th percentile.

Twelve seasons, 767 games, 606 points.

The Finesse Game

251 shots at a median of 33 feet, and above the league rate from every distance on the rink.

Inside twenty: 77 shots on goal and 21 goals — 27.27 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71, and the eighth-best close-range rate in the league among forwards who put sixty shots on goal from there. Twenty to forty: 104 shots and 16 goals, 15.38 per cent, against 11.05. Beyond forty: 70 shots and 4 goals, 5.71 per cent, against 4.16.

Thirty-two forwards in the league beat the positional rate from all three distances on this kind of volume. He is one of them, and he is the only one who does it while taking a third of his attempts as slap shots.

126 slap shots out of 368 tracked attempts — the third-highest count in the league, behind Roman Josi’s 142 and David Pastrnak’s 130, and the highest of any centre. 96.9 mph at the 88th percentile, on that volume, so the reading is as close to face value as this measurement gets.

The one-timer from the left circle is the whole power play and twenty goals is what it produced.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 208, with twenty penalty minutes in eighty-two games.

Top speed 23.2 mph, the 90th percentile; 2.7 bursts a game, the 94th; 3.26 miles a game, the 93rd. High in all three at thirty, which is rare and is the reason he plays twenty minutes against the other club’s best centre.

He kills penalties, takes the hard matchup and finishes his checks without taking penalties for it.

What he does not do is play a heavy game for his size. The 49 per cent chance share from below-neutral zone starts is the honest limit of the two-way file: he is a very good offensive centre being asked to be a complete one, and the ice does not tilt when he is on it.

The Intangibles

Sixth overall in 2011 to Ottawa, five seasons there, and seven here since the trade at twenty-three.

268 goals and 338 assists in 767 games, with the last four seasons the best of them.

He is thirty. The power-play goal total is the least repeatable part of the file and the skating is the most surprising — a thirtieth year in the 90th percentile of measured speed is not what the actuarial tables predict, and while it holds, so does everything else.