Paul Stastny

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

With Winnipeg. 21 goals and 24 assists in 71 games — 45 points at 17:47 a night, plus-14, with 4 power-play goals on 141 shots and 14 penalty minutes.

Twenty-one goals at thirty-six, at 14.9 per cent conversion.

52.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,018 minutes, the 75th percentile. His ice went 53-41 against an expectation of 47.27-42.3 — six goals of scoring above what the chances predicted, on a Winnipeg club whose finishing was 30th in the league.

The Finesse Game

69 per cent of his attempts came from inside 20 feet at a median of 14, the 2nd-closest shot chart of the 393 qualified forwards. And the shot leaves his stick at 77.4 mph — the 0th percentile, and only three forwards in this book recorded a softer one.

Those two facts are the same fact. He does not shoot from anywhere he would have to shoot hard, and twenty-one goals from fourteen feet is what a thirty-six-year-old with no shot velocity left does instead.

800 points in 1,072 career games and 516 assists. The passing has outlasted everything else.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 193, and the tracking is unkind throughout: 21.9 mph top speed at the 27th percentile and 0.2 bursts above 20 mph a game at the 8th. He is slow and he has been slow for four years, and the position at the front of the net is a solution to that rather than a preference.

14 penalty minutes in 71 games. He is a centre of 1,072 games and takes his draws without incident. The repo cannot see a faceoff at all — it records who was on the ice for an end-zone draw and not who took it — so the draw is the reason a thirty-six-year-old winger is still centring a line, and it is the one thing on this page nothing here measures.

The Intangibles

Forty-fourth overall in 2005 by Colorado, and 1,072 games across Colorado, St Louis, Winnipeg twice over and Vegas, with a Calder runner-up finish at twenty-one and 800 points.

He is 36, signed by Carolina for one year. A club with Aho, Staal and Kotkaniemi down the middle has bought a fourth centre who scores from fourteen feet and takes the hard draw, and on a roster this deep that is precisely the right use of him.