Nick Suzuki

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

26 goals and 40 assists in all 82 games — 66 points — at 21:06 a night, with three shorthanded goals. Minus-13, 162 shots at 16.1 per cent, 33 penalty minutes.

Sixty-six points on a club that scored 232 goals, the twenty-sixth-most in the league.

Now the pair of numbers that define his season. His ice took 43.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five — the 13th percentile — and finished 64-67 against an expectation of 46.02-59.65. Eighteen goals more at the offensive end than the chances deserved, and seven more against.

Montreal as a club finished fifth in the league in finishing and thirtieth in generating chances. That is the season in one line and a great deal of it happened on his ice.

Four seasons, 291 games, 209 points.

The Finesse Game

162 shots at a median of 25 feet, 42 per cent from inside twenty and 15 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 24 shots on goal, 1 goal. Inside forty: 135 shots, 25 goals, 18.52 per cent.

16.1 per cent overall is well above his previous career figures — 9.4, 13.6 and 11.3 in his first three seasons — and 18.52 per cent from inside forty is the kind of rate that does not repeat.

33 backhands out of 217 tracked attempts is the highest backhand count in this chapter. He scores from below the goal line and from turning off the wall.

88.3 mph at the 32nd percentile. Nothing here comes from the shot; forty assists at twenty-three is the real asset.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 207, and 33 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 65th percentile; bursts 2.1 a game, the 87th; 3.39 miles a game, the 95th percentile — a defenceman’s mileage from a centre who plays twenty-one minutes.

He is thick through the chest and holds pucks below the goal line against defencemen, which is where the backhand count comes from. What he does not do is finish checks or forecheck the first man, and on a club that generated the third-fewest chances in the league somebody had to.

50.2 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 47th percentile — dead even. The 13th-percentile chance share is not explained away by the deployment.

The Intangibles

Thirteenth overall in 2017 to Vegas, traded to Montreal at nineteen in the Max Pacioretty deal, and named captain at twenty-three.

The honest evaluation is difficult and worth stating carefully. Sixty-six points at twenty-three, at twenty-one minutes a night on a club that scored 232 goals, is a genuinely good season. The 13th-percentile chance share is a genuinely bad number. Both are true, and the eighteen-goal finishing surplus is the reason the second one did not show up on the scoresheet.

What this book would want to know, and cannot, is how much of that surplus was him and how much was Caufield shooting 16.5 per cent beside him.