Sam Reinhart

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

31 goals and 36 assists in all 82 games — 67 points — with 16 of the goals on the power play. Minus-12, 19:47 a night, 227 shots at 13.7 per cent.

Sixteen power-play goals out of thirty-one is more than half his output, and Florida’s power play generated the fourth-most expected goals per sixty in the league.

Now the minus-12, because it is the most misleading number in this chapter. His ice took 55.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 90th percentile — and finished 39-46 against an expectation of 50.63-40.33. Eleven goals short at one end, six long at the other.

That is not a defensive failure. That is a season in which the percentages went against the same man at both ends at once, which is rare and which reverses on its own.

Nine seasons, 614 games, 444 points.

The Finesse Game

227 shots at a median of 19 feet, 51 per cent from inside twenty and 13 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 28 shots on goal, 1 goal. Inside forty: 192 shots, 28 goals, 14.58 per cent.

23 tip-ins and 11 deflections in the tracked types — the highest combined redirect count on the club. He is the man on the goal line and the back post on the power play, and that is where two-thirds of the goals come from.

91.3 mph at the 53rd percentile. Ordinary, and irrelevant to how he scores.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 196, and twelve penalty minutes in eighty-two games — six minors across a full season.

Top speed 21.5 mph, the 13th percentile, which is the second-slowest reading among Florida forwards. Bursts 1.0 a game, the 55th. 3.12 miles a game, the 86th.

That combination — a great deal of ground covered at no great speed — is the ordinary top-six job description and should not be read as a verdict on his skating. What it does mean is that none of his scoring comes from beating a man wide.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2014, seven Buffalo seasons in which the club never made the playoffs, and then 82 and 67 points in his two Florida years.

47.7 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 36th percentile — the deployment was helpful, which makes the minus-12 stranger still rather than more explicable.

The reasonable expectation is that a repeat of this exact season produces a plus figure and the same points. The reasonable worry is that he turns twenty-eight with the finishing already at 13.7 per cent.