Ryan Poehling

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

7 goals and 7 assists in 53 games — 14 points — for Pittsburgh, at 11:46 a night. Minus-2, 64 shots at 10.9 per cent, two shorthanded goals, eight penalty minutes.

52.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 70th percentile, with his ice at 15-19 against an expectation of 20.66-18.8 across 499 minutes — five and a half goals short at the attacking end.

And the deployment: 68 attacking-zone draws against 195 — 25.9 per cent, the 1st percentile of this book. A 70th-percentile chance share out of the first percentile of zone starts is one of the best deployment-adjusted results in the edition.

Four seasons, 138 games, 36 points.

The Finesse Game

64 shots at a median of 23 feet, and seven goals.

Inside twenty: 26 shots on goal and 4 goals, 15.38 per cent, a shade under the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 27 shots and 3 goals, 11.11 per cent, which is the league rate. Beyond forty: eight shots and none.

An ordinary finisher on a small number of chances, which is what twelve minutes a night at the wrong end of the rink produces.

51 wrist shots out of 94 tracked attempts, with 11 tip-ins and four slap. 87.3 mph at the 25th percentile.

16 career assists in 138 games. There is no playmaking argument and the role has never asked for one.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 206, and this is the report.

Top speed 24.3 mph. That is the highest measured reading of any skater in this book — ahead of Brayden Point at 24.26, Connor McDavid at 24.16 and Nathan MacKinnon at 24.02. And 3.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 98th percentile.

2.01 miles a game, the 16th percentile — because twelve minutes a night is twelve minutes a night, and the mileage measures the ice time as much as the player.

So: the fastest man in the league, on a fourth line, starting three shifts in four in his own end. This book has found nothing else quite like it, and the two shorthanded goals are the visible edge of what it is for — he is sent out to chase, and he catches things.

He forechecks at a speed nobody can match, finishes checks, and takes almost no penalties doing it.

The Intangibles

Twenty-fifth overall in 2017 to Montreal, four seasons of not establishing himself there, a trade to Pittsburgh at twenty-three, and now here.

20 goals and 16 assists in 138 games, and a career minus-24.

He is twenty-four. What this book can say with unusual confidence is that the athlete is the best of its kind in the league: nobody skates faster and almost nobody is given a harder shift. What it cannot say is why 138 games have produced 36 points, and three organisations have now had the same question.