Pavel Buchnevich

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

26 goals and 41 assists in 63 games — 67 points — at 19:27 a night. Plus-14, 123 shots at 21.1 per cent, eight on the power play, two game-winners, 36 penalty minutes.

67 points in 63 games follows 76 in 73 the season before, and the plus-14 is the only positive figure among St. Louis’s top six forwards.

48.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 878 minutes, the 34th percentile — the best of any St. Louis forward — with his ice at 53-32 against an expectation of 37.52-39.30. Fifteen goals more than the chances predicted at the good end and seven fewer at the other.

That is a twenty-two-goal swing in his favour on 878 minutes. Some of it is a genuinely good player and most of it will not repeat.

He started 50.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 47th percentile.

The Finesse Game

123 shots at a median of 21 feet, which is a very small volume for a first-line winger at nineteen minutes a night.

From twenty to forty feet: 50 shots on goal and 14 goals — 28.00 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 65 shots and 14 goals, 21.54, above the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: eight shots and none.

Twenty-eight per cent from the mid-slot is two and a half times the league rate, and on fifty shots it is the least repeatable number in this chapter. A 21.1 per cent shooting percentage is the third-highest of the 261 forwards in this book who took a hundred shots, behind Andrei Kuzmenko and Brayden Point.

His career figure is 15.0 per cent across 900 shots, which is itself outstanding. The gap between 15.0 and 21.1 on 123 shots is about seven goals.

181 tracked attempts, and the mix is unusually even: 84 wrist, 23 snap, 21 slap, 20 tip-in, 20 backhand, five wrap-arounds. He shoots from wherever the puck reaches him and does not wait for the right one.

90.0 mph at the 43rd percentile. The shot is ordinary and the release and the placement are not.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 196 pounds, with 36 penalty minutes in 63 games and 182 in 437 career games.

3.07 miles a game at the 83rd percentile, a top speed of 22.3 mph at the 50th, 0.8 bursts above twenty a game at the 44th. A great deal of ground covered at ordinary speed, which is the shape of a winger who works rather than one who beats people.

He forechecks with real intent and wins pucks along the wall, and the plus-14 on a club that finished twenty-seventh in chance share is not an accident of linemates.

He is not a physical player in the punishing sense and does not need to be: the work is in the pursuit rather than in the contact at the end of it.

The Intangibles

Seventy-fifth overall in 2013, the third round, seven seasons, 437 games, 338 points across the Rangers and St. Louis.

135 goals at a career 15.0 per cent. The two St. Louis seasons produced 76 points in 73 games and 67 in 63, which is the best two-year stretch of his career at twenty-seven and twenty-eight.

He is twenty-eight, on the best-value contract on the roster, and the one forward here whose underlying record survives the club’s collapse.

What this file cannot settle is how much of a 21.1 per cent shooting percentage is skill. The career 15.0 says a lot of it is; the 123 shots say not this much of it.