Nicklas Backstrom

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

7 goals and 14 assists in 39 games — 21 points — at 16:53 a night. Minus-25, 59 shots at 11.9 per cent, six on the power play, 14 penalty minutes.

Thirty-nine games, in his first season back after hip resurfacing surgery.

48.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 495 minutes, the 33rd percentile, with his ice at 14-27 against an expectation of 19.34-20.35.

Five fewer goals scored than the chances called for and seven more allowed, which is a twelve-goal swing against him in four hundred and ninety-five minutes. That is where a minus-25 in thirty-nine games comes from, and almost none of it is repeatable.

He started 50.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 47th percentile.

The Finesse Game

59 shots at a median of 22 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 31 shots on goal and five goals — 16.13 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 22 shots and three goals, 13.64 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: six shots and none. Fifty-nine shots on goal is not a sample.

80 tracked attempts, 42 of them wrist shots and 12 tip-ins. His shot is measured at 85.3 mph, the 13th percentile.

A career 12.0 per cent across 1,097 games and 271 goals — but the goals were never the file.

761 career assists is the file entire. He sees a passing lane a beat before it opens and he has done it for sixteen seasons, and it is the one thing hip surgery has not taken.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 202 pounds, with 14 penalty minutes in 39 games and 502 in 1,097 career games.

A top speed of 20.3 mph — the 0th percentile, and the third-slowest maximum of any skater in this book — and 0.1 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 1st percentile. He covers 2.64 miles a game, the 56th.

He reached twenty miles an hour twice in thirty-nine games.

That is what a resurfaced hip looks like measured, and it is the most direct thing this project has ever been able to say about an injury. He was never fast; he is now among the slowest men in the league, and he is playing seventeen minutes a night anyway.

He is not physical and never has been. The defensive work is anticipation and stick position, which is the only version of it available now.

The Intangibles

Fourth overall in 2006, sixteen seasons, 1,097 games, 1,032 points, all of them here, and a Stanley Cup.

271 goals and 761 assists, and a plus-86.

He is thirty-five, and every one of his thousand and thirty-two points was scored for this club.

The honest reading is short. The hockey sense is intact, the hip is not, and the tracking says the difference is about as large as a difference can be. What the club has is a thousand-point centre who can no longer skate, on a roster that finished twenty-fourth.