Mike Hoffman

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 20 assists in 67 games — 34 points — at 15:40 a night for Montreal. Minus-10, 148 shots at 9.5 per cent, one on the power play, three game-winners, 28 penalty minutes.

44.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 11th percentile, across 849 minutes — the worst chance share of any forward in this chapter — with his ice at 31-33 against an expectation of 29.57-37.55.

He started 48 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 37th percentile, so the share is not explained by the deployment.

One power-play goal, from a man with 72 of them in his career, is the number that says most about the season he had.

The Finesse Game

148 shots at a median of 34 feet, with 41 per cent of his attempts from between twenty and forty feet and 35 per cent from beyond forty.

From twenty to forty feet: 56 shots on goal and nine goals — 16.07 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 35 shots and five goals, 14.29, below the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 48 shots on goal and no goals at all.

And this is the cleanest test the book has of the point-shot argument, because he is the man it should work for. His shot is measured at 100.1 mph, the 97th percentile. He slaps 54 of his 198 tracked attempts — 27.3 per cent, the highest share of any forward in this chapter. He took 48 shots on goal from beyond forty feet, more than any San Jose forward.

He scored none of them.

Across the league a forward converts 4.16 per cent from that distance, so nothing from 48 is about two goals of bad luck rather than a finding on its own. Put beside Trouba, Letang and Marcus Pettersson, though, it is the fourth such case in three chapters, and the pattern is now hard to argue with: a hard slap shot from range is a floor, not a lift, and the men who live on it do not out-score the men who do not.

Where he is genuinely good is one band closer. 16.07 per cent from the mid-slot is half again the league rate, on 56 shots, and that is where a hundred-mile-an-hour shot actually pays.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190 pounds, with 28 penalty minutes in 67 games.

Top speed 22.7 mph at the 74th percentile with 0.9 bursts above twenty a game at the 49th, on 2.49 miles a game at the 41st. Ordinary in every direction.

He does not defend and the club knows it. An 11th-percentile chance share out of a neutral deployment is the record of a winger whose contribution ends when the puck does, and at thirty-three there is no reason to expect that to change.

247 penalty minutes in 679 career games. He is not a physical player, avoids contact along the wall, and is the least useful forward on this roster once the other team has the puck.

The Intangibles

A hundred and thirtieth overall in 2009, the fifth round, twelve seasons, 679 games, 464 points across four clubs.

218 goals, 72 of them on the power play, and six seasons of twenty-two or more. The 36 he scored for Florida in 2018-19 is the peak.

He is thirty-three, on a one-year deal with a rebuilding club, and the job is explicit: shoot on the power play and let somebody else play the other two hundred feet. The shot is still measurably one of the hardest in the league.

What this file says about the point shot is worth more to the book than what it says about him.