Pierre Engvall

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

17 goals and 13 assists in 76 games — 30 points — split between Toronto and the Islanders, at 13:38 a night. Plus-8, 131 shots at 13.0 per cent, four game-winners, 31 penalty minutes.

55.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 88th percentile and the highest of any forward on this roster — from 185 attacking-zone draws against 263. That is 41.3 per cent, the 16th percentile.

The best chance share on the club, taken from the fourth-hardest deployment on it. Nothing else in this chapter reads like that.

His ice finished 45-37 against an expectation of 43.69-35.16 across 936 minutes.

Four seasons, 244 games, 92 points, a career plus-27.

The Finesse Game

131 shots at a median of 29 feet, and seventeen goals.

Inside twenty: 48 shots on goal and 10 goals, 20.83 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. Twenty to forty: 49 shots and 6 goals. Beyond forty: 34 shots and 1 goal.

Above the league from close on a third-line workload, which for a man whose job description is skating is more than anybody was asking for.

121 wrist shots out of 179 tracked attempts and only four slap. 92.2 mph at the 60th percentile, on four slap shots, so the reading says nothing.

13 assists in seventy-six games is the honest limit of the passing. He carries and he shoots; the play does not go through him.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 208 pounds, with 31 penalty minutes.

2.9 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 96th percentile. Top speed 22.7 mph, the 73rd; 2.31 miles a game, the 32nd.

A 6-6 winger in the top five per cent of the league for how often he reaches full speed is a genuinely rare object, and it is the whole reason a seventh-round pick is a third-line regular.

He forechecks in straight lines at speed and closes on a defenceman before the outlet is made, which is where the chance share comes from.

What he does not do is play heavy. At 208 pounds spread over six and a half feet he is not hard to move off a puck, and the stick work in his own end is ordinary.

The Intangibles

One hundred and eighty-eighth overall in 2014, the seventh round, out of Sweden, and four seasons in Toronto before the deadline trade that brought him here.

47 goals in 244 games at a rate that has climbed every year, and a career plus-27 on clubs where he was never given more than a third line.

He is twenty-seven. The measurements say the skating is real and near the top of the league, and the file’s whole question is whether a man who can do that and finish above the league rate from the slot has ever been given the minutes to find out.