Nikita Kucherov

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

30 goals and 83 assists in 82 games — 113 points — at 20:08 a night. Minus-2, 271 shots at 11.1 per cent, eight on the power play, four game-winners, 36 penalty minutes.

83 assists is four short of the 87 he recorded in 2018-19, and 113 points is his second-best total behind the 128 of the same season.

54.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,242 minutes, the 82nd percentile, with his ice at 72-59 against an expectation of 67.17-55.95.

He started 63.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 96th percentile.

The minus-2 on a 113-point season is a curiosity rather than a finding: his ice was five goals better than the chances at the good end and three worse at the other, which is close to exactly what the club did as a whole.

The Finesse Game

271 shots at a median of 32 feet, and 396 tracked attempts — the highest count on this roster, and the fourteenth-highest in the league.

From twenty to forty feet: 138 shots on goal and 12 goals — 8.70 per cent, below the league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 61 shots and 12 goals, 19.67, above the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 73 shots and five goals, 6.85, above the league rate of 4.16.

Below the rate in the band that carries half his volume. An 11.1 per cent shooting percentage against a career 14.5 is about nine goals of shortfall, and a thirty-goal season out of that is the floor of what this shot chart produces.

80 of his 396 attempts are slap shots — a 20.2 per cent share, unusually high for a winger — and 73 shots on goal from beyond forty feet is a very large number for a forward. He is shooting from the point on the power play, which is where a good deal of the assist total is also generated.

94.0 mph at the 71st percentile.

The 83 assists are the file. 453 career assists against 276 goals, from a winger who holds the puck on the half-wall until the third option opens, and nobody in the league is more patient with it.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 173 pounds, which is the lightest weight carried by any forward in this chapter.

3.20 miles a game at the 90th percentile, a top speed of 22.0 mph at the 35th, 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 60th. A great deal of ground covered at ordinary speed, which is what a possession winger’s tracking line looks like.

36 penalty minutes in 82 games and 319 in 644 career games. He is not a physical player and avoids contact deliberately, which at 173 pounds is the only sensible way to have played 644 games.

The puck protection is the physical skill and it is not about strength: he changes the angle of his body and his stick faster than the checker can commit, and the puck stays on the far side of him.

The Intangibles

Fifty-eighth overall in 2011, the second round, nine seasons, 644 games, 729 points, all of them here, and two Stanley Cups.

276 goals and 453 assists, with the 128-point Hart season in 2018-19 the peak and five seasons above 85 points.

He is thirty, on a club that has kept its core together through two championships and is now paying for all of it at once.

A second-round pick with 729 points in 644 games is one of the best value selections in this book, and the assist rate has gone up rather than down as he has aged.