Nino Niederreiter

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

24 goals and 17 assists in 78 games — 41 points — at 16:17 a night between Nashville and Winnipeg. Minus-13, 181 shots at 13.3 per cent, four on the power play, 22 penalty minutes.

52.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,039 minutes, the 70th percentile, with his ice at 46-42 against an expectation of 46.18-41.12 — the goals matched the chances at both ends almost exactly.

He started 56.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 81st percentile.

It is the fourth time he has reached twenty-four, and the third time in four seasons he has scored twenty or more.

The Finesse Game

181 shots at a median of 18 feet, with 53 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 10 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 98 shots on goal and 15 goals — 15.31 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 57 shots and seven goals, 12.28 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 24 shots and two goals, 8.33.

Ninety-eight shots on goal from inside twenty feet is the fortieth-largest close-range volume in this book, from a man who played sixteen minutes a night, and it is the whole file: he stands where goals are scored and he shoots from there ninety-eight times.

A career 12.8 per cent across 810 games, against 13.3 last season. There is no froth here.

235 tracked attempts, 119 of them wrist shots, 31 tip-ins and 20 deflected shots — nearly a quarter of everything he puts toward the net is a redirection. His shot is measured at 88.5 mph, the 34th percentile, which is soft, and at eighteen feet it does not matter.

205 goals in 810 career games.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 218 pounds, with 22 penalty minutes in 78 games and 374 in 810 career games.

Top speed 22.0 mph at the 35th percentile, 1.0 bursts above twenty a game at the 55th, 2.54 miles a game at the 46th. Ordinary in every direction at thirty.

He forechecks by hitting and he is very hard to move off a puck, which at 218 pounds is the reason a slow winger with a soft shot has played eight hundred NHL games.

He wins pucks along the wall and takes them to the net himself, and the eighteen-foot median is that sentence written as a number.

He is not fast and never was; the whole game happens between the circles.

The Intangibles

Fifth overall in 2010, twelve seasons, 810 games, 409 points across the Islanders, Minnesota, Carolina, Nashville and Winnipeg.

205 goals and 204 assists, and a plus-53.

He is thirty-one, a Swiss winger drafted fifth overall who has scored two hundred NHL goals without ever being a star.

Two hundred goals and eight hundred games from a fifth-overall pick reads like a disappointment and is not one. What the file describes is a durable, heavy, entirely honest second-line winger who has done the same thing for five clubs and will do it here.