Nico Hischier

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

31 goals and 49 assists in 81 games — 80 points — at 19:17 a night. Plus-33, the best figure on the club, with 256 shots at 12.1 per cent, three shorthanded goals and nine game-winners.

59.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 97th percentile and the highest of any Devil, with his ice at 61-39 against an expectation of 59.29-40.44 — which is to say the goals arrived where the chances said they would.

And the deployment behind it runs the other way from his team-mates’. He started 47.6 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone, the 35th percentile: 373 attacking draws against 411 in his own end.

Set that beside Jack Hughes at the 98th percentile and a 57.9 per cent share. New Jersey’s two centres were given opposite ends of the rink, and the one who began in his own came back with the better number. That is the most useful fact in this chapter.

Six seasons, 381 games, 286 points, all of them here.

The Finesse Game

256 shots at a median of 21 feet, 135 of them on goal from inside twenty.

19 goals from inside twenty on 135 shots, 14.07 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71; 7 from twenty to forty on 80.

So the 31 goals are a volume result rather than a finishing one, and the rate says a slightly below-average converter taking an above-average number of chances from the right places.

48 tip-ins out of 342 tracked attempts — 14 per cent, and the highest count on the club by a distance. That is a specific skill and not a small one: it is the shot a man gets by standing where he will be hit, and it is the same instinct that produces three shorthanded goals.

130 wrist shots, 100 snap, 12 slap. 88.1 mph at the 31st percentile, on twelve slap shots, so there is nothing in it to read.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 200, with ten penalty minutes in eighty-one games.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 68th percentile; 1.9 bursts a game, the 84th; 2.82 miles a game, the 68th. An entirely ordinary set of readings for a first-line centre, which is the point — none of what he does well shows up in the tracking.

He kills penalties, takes the hit to make the play, and is on the ice at the end of games this club is trying to protect. Nine game-winners is the counting shadow of that, and the plus-33 is the rest of it.

The part this book cannot see is the faceoff circle, because the record counts every skater on the ice at a draw and never who took it. What it can see is that his shifts began in his own end more often than in the other team’s, which is the deployment a coach gives the man he trusts.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2017, the captaincy since 2021, and 381 games without ever having played for another organisation.

He has been the second-most-discussed centre on his own team for two seasons and has the better underlying record of the two. Both of those things are true at once.

At twenty-four, with 286 points and a plus-33 taken from harder zone starts than any other forward in this club’s top six, he is a large part of why a club that led the league in chance generation also finished seventh in chances against.