Noel Acciari

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

14 goals and 9 assists in 77 games — 23 points — at 14:19 a night between St. Louis and Toronto. Minus-4, 102 shots at 13.7 per cent, two game-winners, 21 penalty minutes.

Fourteen goals is the second-highest total of an eight-season career and came on a hundred and two shots.

50.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 950 minutes, the 46th percentile, with his ice at 24-35 against an expectation of 35.44-35.29. Eleven goals short of the chances at the good end and exactly on them at the other, which is the largest one-directional finishing shortfall in this chapter.

He started 37.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 10th percentile.

The Finesse Game

102 shots at a median of 19 feet — the shortest on the club — with 53 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 7 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 52 shots on goal and nine goals, 17.31 per cent, which is the league forward rate of 17.71 within half a point. From twenty to forty: 38 shots and three goals, 7.89 per cent against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: eight shots, one goal.

32 of his 144 tracked attempts are tip-ins — 22.2 per cent, the ninth-highest share of the 477 forwards in this book who took a hundred attempts, and he does it on half the volume of the men above him.

He scores from within a stick’s length of the crease and from nowhere else. Two slap shots all season, and 85.8 mph at the 15th percentile, neither of which is relevant to the job.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 204 pounds. Top speed 21.3 mph, the 9th percentile; 0.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 12th; 2.23 miles a game, the 26th. By the tracking he is one of the slowest regular forwards in the league on every measure at once.

What he does instead is finish every check that is available to him, which is the entire physical file and the reason he has played 384 games without a scoring record to support it.

He is punishing on the forecheck and along the wall, and at 204 pounds on a fourth line the contact is the product rather than a by-product of it.

21 penalty minutes in 77 games is remarkably low for that method, and 142 in 384 career games says the same thing: the hitting is clean and it is constant.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of eight seasons and 384 games, with 100 career points.

A fourth-line centre who came into the league at twenty-four and has stayed for eight years on hitting, penalty-killing and net-front work is a specific kind of player, and the 20 goals he scored in 2019-20 have never repeated.

He is thirty-one and arrives on a club that scored 262 goals and needed a fourth line that could be sent out in its own end. That is precisely what he is: the 10th percentile of zone starts, the 46th percentile of chance share, and no pretence about anything else.