Nick Bonino

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

10 goals and 9 assists in 62 games — 19 points — for Pittsburgh, at 15:54 a night. Minus-5, 91 shots at 11.0 per cent, 28 penalty minutes.

49.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 44th percentile, with his ice at 31-32 against an expectation of 27.76-28.76 across 747 minutes.

He started 41.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 15th percentile: 197 attacking draws against 281. The offensive-zone ice-time figure agrees — 38.6 per cent, the 8th percentile — and the two are counting different things, which is why it is worth having both.

Fourteen seasons, 823 games, 353 points, seven organisations.

The Finesse Game

91 shots at a median of 23 feet, and ten goals.

Inside twenty: 39 shots on goal and 7 goals, 17.95 per cent, which is the league forward rate. From twenty to forty: 42 shots and 5 goals, 11.90 per cent, also the league rate. Beyond forty: 13 shots and none.

An exactly average finisher from both useful ranges at thirty-five, which is a more respectable line than the point total suggests.

69 wrist shots and 16 tip-ins out of 118 tracked attempts, three slap. 84.3 mph at the 9th percentile.

195 career assists against 158 goals. The passing is what has kept him employed through seven organisations.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 198, with 28 penalty minutes.

Bursts above twenty miles an hour: seven, in sixty-two games — 0.1 a game, the 2nd percentile of the league. Top speed 21.6 mph, the 19th; 2.28 miles a game, the 30th.

Seven sprints in a season is close to the floor of what this book measures, and it is what a thirty-five-year-old defensive centre has left.

He kills penalties, takes the draw in his own end, and positions himself so that the sprint is never necessary. The 15th-percentile deployment is a coaching staff’s statement that he can still do it.

There is no physical game to speak of and there has not been for years.

The Intangibles

One hundred and seventy-third overall in 2007, the sixth round, and 823 games across Anaheim, Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Minnesota, San Jose and Pittsburgh again.

Two Stanley Cups in Pittsburgh and a reputation as the third-line centre a contender adds in March.

He is thirty-five and the tracking says the legs have gone. What is left is the reading of the play and the faceoff circle, and a fourteenth season on a fourth line is the market’s estimate of how much longer that is worth a roster spot.