Morgan Frost

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

19 goals and 27 assists in 81 games — 46 points — at 16:21 a night. Minus-12, 155 shots at 12.3 per cent, three game-winners, 24 penalty minutes.

The three seasons before this produced 23 points in 77 games. This is the first one that looks like an NHL career.

48 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 40th percentile, with his ice at 47-49 against an expectation of 42.29-45.82 across 1,095 minutes.

He started 55.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 74th percentile: 315 attacking draws against 254, which is the softest deployment given to any Flyers forward who played a full season.

Four seasons, 158 games, 69 points, a career minus-26.

The Finesse Game

155 shots at a median of 25 feet, and nineteen goals.

Inside twenty: 73 shots on goal and 12 goals, 16.44 per cent, a shade under the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 54 shots and 5 goals, 9.26 per cent. Beyond forty: 28 shots and 3 goals, 10.71 per cent, which on twenty-eight shots is noise.

So an average finisher from the only range that matters, taking a fair number of shots from it. Nineteen goals is what that produces over eighty-one games and there is nothing in the chart to suggest more.

109 wrist shots out of 206 tracked attempts, with 30 tip-ins and 25 backhands and five slap shots. That is a chart built below the goal line and in the traffic rather than off a release.

43 career assists against 26 goals. The passing has always been the half the club drafted him for and 27 assists is the first season it has shown up in the counting.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 193, with 24 penalty minutes.

Top speed 23.1 mph, the 87th percentile; 2.2 bursts a game, the 88th. 2.76 miles a game, the 64th.

Genuinely fast and willing to use it, which is the part of the file that never showed up in three seasons of minor-league and fourth-line minutes.

What he does not do is win a puck. At 193 pounds he is moved off the wall, does not forecheck into contact and is not on the penalty kill.

The 74th-percentile zone starts are the club’s statement about all of that: he is given the attacking end and Cates and Laughton take the other one.

The Intangibles

Twenty-seventh overall in 2017, and 69 points in 158 games across four seasons.

The career minus-26 was accumulated almost entirely on clubs that finished twenty-sixth or worse, which softens it without erasing it.

He is twenty-four. The skating is in the top eighth of the league and the passing is real; what the file needs is a season of neutral deployment to find out whether the 48 per cent chance share is the roster or the player.