Patrik Laine

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

22 goals and 30 assists in 55 games, minus-12, 19:07 a night, 184 shots at 12.0 per cent. He missed 27 games.

47.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 36th percentile, with his ice at 36-33 against an expectation of 34.37-37.49 — a shade better than the chances at both ends, which on a club that finished 30th makes him one of the very few Blue Jackets whose minutes were not a loss.

Seven seasons, 462 games, 198 goals. He has scored 20 or more in six of them, and he has played 82 games twice — both before he turned 21.

The Finesse Game

184 shots at a median of 36 feet — only 15 per cent from inside twenty and 38 per cent from beyond forty. No other forward on this roster shoots from that far out, and almost no forward in the league does it and scores.

From beyond forty feet he took 67 shots and scored five — 7.46 per cent, against a league rate of 4.16 per cent for a forward. Inside forty: 112 shots, eighteen goals.

45 of his attempts were slap shots, the most of any forward in this chapter, and his registered shot speed is 101.1 mph at the 98th percentile. This book has spent a season documenting the slap shot leaving the game and the long shot yielding nothing; Laine is the man it does not describe. He shoots from range, he winds up to do it, and it works.

The caution attached is the same as always: the tracked maximum is largely a record of whether a man winds up. In his case the shot type and the yield agree with it, which is the rare instance where the measurement is telling the truth about the player.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 208. 22.6 mph at the 64th percentile, 2.94 miles a game at the 77th, 1.9 bursts a game at the 84th — better than his reputation on all three counts, and the reputation is about pace of thought rather than pace of foot.

16 penalty minutes in 55 games. He does not initiate contact and does not absorb much, and at 6-4 that is the longest-standing criticism of him.

The defensive record is unremarkable rather than bad, which for a shooter of this type is a reasonable outcome.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2016, 36 goals as a rookie and 44 in his second year, and a career that has been described as unfulfilled since he was 20.

The honest accounting: 198 goals in 462 games is a rate of 0.43 a game, which over a full season is 35. Very few players in the league sustain that. What he has not done is play — 55, 56 and 46 games in three of the last four years — and that, rather than the compete or the skating, is the case against him.