Nick Paul

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

17 goals and 15 assists in 80 games — 32 points — at 16:10 a night. Plus-11, 120 shots at 14.2 per cent, four on the power play, one shorthanded, four game-winners, 33 penalty minutes.

17 goals is a career high by one and 32 points equals his best.

49.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,075 minutes, the 45th percentile, with his ice at 43-33 against an expectation of 41.08-41.30 — eight goals better than the chances at the defensive end.

He started 44.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 27th percentile: 283 attacking draws against 348 defensive ones. Only Austin Watson, Luke Glendening and Tyler Motte were sent out in worse circumstances on this club, and all three played under thirteen minutes a night.

The Finesse Game

120 shots at a median of 23 feet.

From twenty to forty feet: 51 shots on goal and eight goals — 15.69 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 48 shots and six goals, 12.50, below the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 18 shots and two goals, 11.11.

Above the rate from the mid-slot and below it from close range, which is an unusual distribution for a 234-pound forward: most men his size score from inside twenty feet and he does not.

A 14.2 per cent shooting percentage against a career 9.0 across 567 shots. That difference is about six goals, and the career figure is the better guide to what comes next.

177 tracked attempts, 37 of them backhands — a 20.9 per cent share, which is the highest of any forward in this book with a hundred and fifty attempts — and 21 tip-ins. Five slap shots.

A backhand share that high is the record of a forward who plays with his back to the net and takes what is available from there. 91.3 mph at the 53rd percentile.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 234 pounds — the heaviest forward in this chapter — with 33 penalty minutes in 80 games and 125 in 328 career games, which is a very low rate for a man that size.

Top speed 22.7 mph at the 71st percentile, 1.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 64th, 2.60 miles a game at the 53rd. He is quicker than 234 pounds has any business being.

He is hard to move anywhere on the ice and the backhand count is the direct evidence: the puck stays with him through contact and comes out the other side.

He forechecks first man and finishes checks, and at his size the defencemen he arrives at do not make the next pass cleanly.

The Intangibles

A hundred and first overall in 2013, the fourth round, eight seasons, 328 games, 112 points across Ottawa and Tampa Bay.

51 goals in eight years, 17 of them last season. The career took six years to start: 28 points in his first five seasons combined.

He is twenty-eight, on a club that has won two championships, in a second-line job with the fourth-hardest forward deployment on the roster.

What the file describes is a late-blooming power forward who has become genuinely useful at twenty-seven and twenty-eight, and whose shooting percentage says the seventeen goals were the good end of the range.