Nikolaj Ehlers

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

12 goals and 26 assists in 45 games — 38 points — at 15:39 a night. Minus-2, 132 shots at 9.1 per cent, three on the power play, 11 penalty minutes.

Forty-five games, ended by injury, at a rate of 0.84 points a game — the best of his career.

55.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 86th percentile, across 564 minutes, with his ice at 27-21 against an expectation of 29.93-24.14. A 56.6 per cent share of the attempts, which is the highest on this roster.

He started 63.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 96th percentile.

Fifteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds a night from a man producing at eighty points a season is the most-argued-about deployment in this book, and it has looked like that for eight years.

The Finesse Game

132 shots at a median of 31 feet, and 207 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 30 shots on goal and five goals — 16.67 per cent, just below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 63 shots and seven goals, 11.11 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 36 shots and no goals.

On the league rate at both bands that carry his volume, and a career 11.8 per cent across 523 games — so the 9.1 last season was a shade unlucky and nothing more.

38 slap shots out of 207 attempts is an 18.4 per cent share, which is high for a winger, and his shot is measured at 95.0 mph, the 78th percentile — hard, from a hundred and sixty-eight pounds.

176 goals and 220 assists in 523 career games.

He carries the puck into the offensive zone at speed and beats the first defender wide, which is the thing he does better than anybody on this roster and the reason his ice is 56.6 per cent of the attempts.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 168 pounds — one of the lightest players in this book — with 11 penalty minutes in 45 games and 176 in 523 career games.

3.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 97th percentile — at a top speed of 23.1 mph, the 88th, on 2.56 miles a game at the 48th, which is fifteen minutes of ice time.

That is one of the best speed profiles in this book and it is the whole athletic case: he is fast, and he is at speed three times a game on a fourth of the ice time a first-line winger gets.

He is not physical, does not forecheck by contact, and at 168 pounds is knocked off the puck by anybody who reaches him.

He avoids contact by anticipating it, which works at speed and does not work along a wall, and it is the reason a coach who wants his wingers to finish checks has never fully trusted him.

The durability is the other half: 45 games, 62, 47, 71 — he has played more than seventy-two games twice in eight seasons, and both were before 2018.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2014, eight seasons, 523 games, 396 points, all of them here.

176 goals and 220 assists, and a plus-65 — the best career plus-minus of any forward on this roster.

He is twenty-seven, a Danish first-round pick, and he has been the club’s most efficient forward per minute for most of a decade while playing the fewest minutes of any of its top six.

That sentence is the file and it has not changed in five years. The chance share is excellent, the plus-minus is the best on the club, the production per minute is first-line, and the ice time is not. Somebody is wrong, and this book’s numbers say it is not him.