Patrice Bergeron

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

25 goals and 40 assists in 73 games — 65 points at 18:10 a night, plus-26, with 8 power-play goals on 293 shots and 32 penalty minutes.

69.0 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 910 minutes — the highest figure of any skater in this book. His ice went 49-25 against an expectation of 51.43-23.07: the scoring landed almost exactly where the chances said, and two more went in behind him than they predicted.

Forty-nine goals for and twenty-five against, in 910 minutes, at thirty-six years old. There is no other line like it anywhere in this edition.

44.6 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the offensive zone, the 95th percentile. That is not deployment — the reputation is for defensive-zone starts — it is what happens to the puck once the shift begins.

13.25 shots per 60 is the 99th percentile among the league’s forwards. At thirty-six he attempted more per minute than almost anybody in hockey.

The Finesse Game

293 attempts at a median of 27 feet, 34 per cent of them from inside 20, converting at 8.5 per cent — the 25th percentile. The volume is enormous and the finish is ordinary, which has been true for a decade and is why the goal totals have never matched the reputation.

2.18 even-strength points per 60 at the 79th percentile, with 35 per cent of his points on the power play, the 90th. 982 career points across 1,216 games.

He is the best faceoff man of his generation and the draw is where every one of these numbers starts. A centre who wins the puck at the dot begins the shift with it, and a shift begun with the puck is most of what a 69 per cent chance share is.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 196, and 3.53 hits per 60 at the 45th percentile. He was never a heavy player and does not need to be: 0.95 giveaways per 60 is among the lowest rates for a forward in the league, and a man who does not lose the puck is not often in a position to have to take it back.

The legs are finally the age. Top speed 22.1 mph is the 30th percentile, 2.6 bursts above 20 mph per 60 is the 15th, and 9.22 miles per sixty is the 16th. He is slower than most of the league and it has not cost him a thing yet, because he is never further than a stick’s length from where the puck is going.

The Intangibles

Forty-fifth overall in 2003. Nineteen seasons, one club, 1,216 games and a captaincy taken up at thirty-five, with 400 goals, 982 points and five Selke trophies.

He is 37, on a one-year contract signed in August after a summer in which retirement was genuinely on the table. The measured record says he was the most effective five-on-five player in hockey last season, which makes this the strangest sentence in the book: the best two-way centre of his era is playing the season a year at a time and could stop at the end of it.