Noah Gregor

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

10 goals and 7 assists in 57 games — 17 points — at 12:58 a night for San Jose. Minus-9, 119 shots at 8.4 per cent, 32 penalty minutes.

Ten goals is a career high.

45 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 702 minutes, the 15th percentile, with his ice at 25-32 against an expectation of 28.51-34.88. A 43 per cent share of the attempts.

He started 41.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 16th percentile: 180 attacking draws against 256 defensive ones. A fourth line on a club that finished twenty-ninth in the league with 60 points, taking the defensive half of it.

The Finesse Game

119 shots at a median of 26 feet, with 38 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 45 shots on goal and six goals — 13.33 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 49 shots and four goals, 8.16 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 20 shots and no goals.

Below the rate at every distance, on a hundred and fourteen shots on goal. A career 7.1 per cent across 178 games says the same thing at greater length.

168 tracked attempts, 104 of them wrist shots and exactly one slap shot in a season. 89.2 mph at the 39th percentile.

So the shot is the weakness and it is not close. He carries the puck into the zone at speed and then has to decide what to do with it, and the record of those decisions is 51 points in 178 games.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 201 pounds, with 32 penalty minutes in 57 games and 71 in 178 career games.

A top speed of 23.6 mph, the 98th percentile — the thirteenth-fastest of the 637 skaters in this book — and 2.9 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 96th percentile. He covers 2.11 miles a game, the 20th.

That combination is the file. A maximum speed grows with the number of shifts a man takes, so thirteen minutes a night makes the 23.6 an understatement rather than an inflation, and the burst count says he is at that speed nearly three times a game. The low mileage is the ice time, not the effort.

There is nothing else in this book quite shaped like it: 98th-percentile top speed and 20th-percentile distance, in the same season.

He is not a physical forward and the 32 penalty minutes are mostly the stick fouls of a man arriving after the play. He forechecks hard and gets there first, which is what the speed is actually for.

The Intangibles

A hundred and eleventh overall in 2016, the fourth round, four seasons, 178 games, 51 points, all of them in San Jose.

26 goals and 25 assists, and a minus-51 in 178 games — a rate as bad as anything in this chapter, accumulated on four consecutive non-playoff clubs.

He is twenty-five, joining a club that finished fourth in the league for a fourth-line job.

What the file describes is elite straight-line speed attached to a shot that does not go in and a chance share that has never once been positive. The speed is the reason to keep looking; four seasons of the other column is the reason nobody has paid for it.