Noah Cates

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

13 goals and 25 assists in 82 games — 38 points — at 17:46 a night, in a first full NHL season. Plus-3 on a club that was minus-55 in goal difference, with 107 shots at 12.2 per cent, one shorthanded goal, five game-winners, and twelve penalty minutes.

47.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 37th percentile, with his ice at 42-39 against an expectation of 40.17-43.83 across 1,124 minutes — five goals better than the chances at the defensive end.

He started 43.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 22nd percentile: 316 attacking draws against 414. A rookie handed the hardest forward deployment on the club, who came back with a positive plus-minus on a team that conceded fifty-five goals more than it scored.

Two seasons, 98 games, 47 points.

The Finesse Game

107 shots at a median of 22 feet, and thirteen goals.

Inside twenty: 60 shots on goal and 9 goals, 15.00 per cent. From twenty to forty: 35 shots and 3 goals. Beyond forty: ten shots all season.

A slightly below-average finisher on a low volume, which is the correct description and is not the reason he plays seventeen minutes.

67 wrist shots out of 151 tracked attempts, with 28 tip-ins and 15 backhands and five slap shots. That is a chart made entirely below the dots: redirects, rebounds and work from behind the net.

25 assists in a first full season, and 29 in 98 career games. The passing is genuinely good and it is what the ice time is for.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 194, with twelve penalty minutes across eighty-two games — the lowest count of any forward on this roster who played a full schedule.

Top speed 21.8 mph, the 24th percentile; 0.5 bursts a game, the 25th; 2.79 miles a game, the 67th.

Bottom quarter of the league in both speed measures and above it in ground covered — a great deal of skating at a modest pace, which is what a defensive-zone shift looks like when it works.

He kills penalties, wins pucks below his own goal line, and gets his stick into passing lanes rather than into opponents. Twelve penalty minutes from the hardest zone starts on the club is positioning, not passivity.

At 194 pounds he will be moved off the front of a net, and none of what he is worth requires him to stand there.

The Intangibles

One hundred and thirty-seventh overall in 2017, the fifth round, three years at Minnesota-Duluth, and a first full season at twenty-four.

Thirty-eight points, a plus-3, and the hardest deployment among the club’s forwards.

He is twenty-four and the ceiling is a third-line centre who can be trusted against anybody. On a club that has finished twenty-sixth, that is not the most exciting thing to be, and the plus-3 says it is currently the most useful.