Sidney Crosby

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

33 goals and 60 assists in 82 games — 93 points — at 20:09 a night. Plus-8, 255 shots at 12.9 per cent, nine on the power play, nine game-winners, 52 penalty minutes.

He played all 82 for the second time in eighteen seasons.

54.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 80th percentile, with his ice at 67-51 against an expectation of 66.49-55.94 across 1,247 minutes. That is a good share converted slightly better than the chances predicted, on a club whose finishing was the worst in the league.

He started 62.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 95th percentile.

The Finesse Game

255 shots at a median of 22 feet, with 47 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 114 shots on goal and 23 goals — 20.18 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty he was seven from 79, at 8.86 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty, four from 44.

So the close-range finishing is above the rate and the mid-slot is below it, on a hundred and ninety-three shots on goal from inside forty feet. At thirty-five that is the distribution of a player who is still getting to the front of the net and no longer beating anybody from the circle.

The tracked attempts are where he stops looking like anybody else. 348 of them: 179 wrist shots, then 44 tip-ins and 42 backhands. A backhand share of 12.1 per cent is close to double the median forward’s 7.4, and the tip-ins are the record of a man who spends the offensive zone within a stick’s length of the goaltender.

93.1 mph, the 65th percentile. The shot has never been the instrument. The puck arrives from below the hash marks because he took it there.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 200 pounds, with 52 penalty minutes and 3.17 miles a game at the 88th percentile, at 22.5 mph and the 62nd, 1.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 77th.

The legs are intact at thirty-five and the tracking says so plainly: he covers ground at the 88th percentile of the league while topping out at a speed a third of it beats.

The strength on the puck is the physical asset and it always has been. He plays with his back to pressure below the goal line and comes out of it with possession, which is why the backhand count is what it is.

783 career penalty minutes across 1,190 games is the record of somebody who finishes checks and does not go looking.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2005, eighteen seasons, 1,190 games, 1,502 points, all of them in one uniform.

Every one of those eighteen seasons has been at a point a game or better. The lowest is 2017-18, 89 points in 82 games; the highest is 2006-07, 120 in 79. There is no season in the table to argue about.

550 goals and 952 assists. He captains a club that has now missed the playoffs and whose roster answer was to trade for a thirty-two-year-old defenceman.

What this file cannot settle is how much of the 93 points is him and how much is the wing beside him, because the two have been inseparable for seven seasons. The one thing it can settle is that nothing in the tracking or the shot chart has started to fall away.