Ryan O'Reilly

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

16 goals and 14 assists in 53 games — 30 points — split between St. Louis and Toronto. Minus-21, 17:57 a night, 102 shots at 15.7 per cent, 16 penalty minutes, four game-winners.

The minus-21 needs taking apart, because it is the second-worst figure in these five chapters and it is not what it looks like.

52.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 72nd percentile — the best chance share of any Nashville forward — and his ice finished 33-44 against an expectation of 34.67-31.15. One goal short at the offensive end and thirteen long at the defensive one. Thirteen goals more than the chances predicted, conceded on his ice, in fifty-three games.

That is goaltending and variance, not defence, and it happened to a man with a Selke Trophy.

He started 44.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 24th percentile.

Fourteen seasons, 991 games, 702 points.

The Finesse Game

102 shots at a median of 19 feet, 53 per cent from inside twenty and 15 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 19 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 79 shots, 16 goals, 20.25 per cent.

Every goal from inside forty feet, at better than twenty per cent, on a shot chart with a median of nineteen feet. That is the most efficient distribution of any forward in this chapter.

The type mix is the widest in the batch — 49 wrist, 16 snap, 10 backhand, 9 tip-in, 5 slap, 5 wrap-around, plus a bat, a poke, a deflection and a between-legs. He scores from everywhere and from every angle, which is what thirty-two years of hands looks like.

89.7 mph at the 42nd percentile.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 207, and 16 penalty minutes in 53 games.

Top speed 21.9 mph, the 30th percentile; bursts 0.7 a game, the 34th; 2.74 miles a game, the 63rd.

He has never been fast and it has never mattered. What he does is win the puck — on the wall, on the draw, and off an opponent’s stick — and sixteen penalty minutes across fifty-three games says he does it cleanly.

He takes the defensive-zone draw and kills penalties, and has done both for fourteen years.

The Intangibles

Thirty-third overall in 2009 to Colorado, a Selke Trophy, a Conn Smythe and a Stanley Cup with St. Louis in 2019, and Nashville is the fifth organisation.

He is thirty-two with 991 games and a minus-21 that the underlying numbers say he did not earn.

What Nashville has signed is a second-line centre who wins faceoffs, kills penalties and converts at twenty per cent from inside forty feet. On a club that finished twenty-seventh in goals and twenty-sixth on the penalty kill, that is precisely the shape of the problem.