Sonny Milano

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

11 goals and 22 assists in 64 games — 33 points — at 12:54 a night. Minus-5, 80 shots at 13.8 per cent, one on the power play, three game-winners, 18 penalty minutes.

33 points is his second-best season, and it followed 34 in Anaheim the year before.

50.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 780 minutes, the 49th percentile, with his ice at 40-46 against an expectation of 33.77-33.38 — six more goals scored than the chances called for and thirteen more allowed.

He started 58.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 85th percentile, so the 49th percentile came out of soft starts.

The Finesse Game

80 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 52 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 7 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 40 shots on goal and 11 goals — 27.50 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 31 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: nine shots and none.

Every goal he scored came from inside twenty feet, and forty shots on goal from outside it produced nothing. On forty shots the 27.50 is not a rate, it is a season.

A career 14.0 per cent across 261 games, which is a high figure and is built on exactly this: he does not shoot from anywhere he cannot score from.

123 tracked attempts, 58 of them wrist shots, 26 backhands — a 21.1 per cent share, one of the highest of any forward in this chapter — and three slap. His shot is measured at 81.5 mph, the 4th percentile, which is among the softest in the league.

He beats a defenceman one-on-one and then has to score from inside ten feet, because there is no other option available to him, and 47 goals in 261 career games says he does it often enough to keep a job.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 205 pounds, with 18 penalty minutes in 64 games and 64 in 261 career games.

2.5 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 92nd percentile, at a top speed of 22.6 mph, the 70th, on 2.16 miles a game at the 22nd, which is thirteen minutes of ice time.

Genuinely quick and constantly at speed, which is the athletic case and it is a good one.

He is not physical, does not forecheck hard enough to win a puck back, and at 205 pounds does not need to be knocked off one to lose it.

The defensive game has been the standing objection since Columbus drafted him, and thirteen more goals allowed on his ice than the chances predicted is not evidence of it, but the eight seasons of bottom-six minutes are.

The Intangibles

Sixteenth overall in 2014, eight seasons, 261 games, 114 points across Columbus, Anaheim and Washington.

47 goals and 67 assists, and a minus-31.

He is twenty-seven, a first-round pick who has never played seventy games in a season and has been let go by two clubs.

The hands were never the question and the rest of it always has been. A 27.50 per cent close-range rate on forty shots and a 4th-percentile shot speed is a strange pair of facts to hold at once, and what they describe is a skill player with one route to a goal and no second one.