Steven Stamkos

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

34 goals and 50 assists in 81 games — 84 points — at 19:01 a night. Minus-5, 240 shots at 14.2 per cent, fourteen on the power play, six game-winners, 46 penalty minutes.

It is his fifteenth season, and he passed a thousand games and a thousand points during it.

51.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,132 minutes, the 54th percentile, with his ice at 63-52 against an expectation of 51.13-48.98 — twelve goals more than the chances at the good end.

He started 52.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 61st percentile.

The Finesse Game

240 shots at a median of 29 feet, with 38 per cent of his attempts from between twenty and forty feet.

From twenty to forty feet: 131 shots on goal and 18 goals — 13.74 per cent, above the league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 42 shots and seven goals — 16.67 per cent, against a league rate for forwards of 4.16. Inside twenty: 70 shots and ten goals, 14.29, below the league rate of 17.71.

Read that middle figure again. Seven goals from forty-two shots on goal beyond forty feet is four times the league rate, and it is the single largest exception this book has found to a finding it has now made in five consecutive chapters.

He slaps 116 of his 343 tracked attempts — 33.8 per cent, the second-highest of the 62 forwards in this book who took three hundred attempts, behind Mika Zibanejad — and his shot is measured at 98.8 mph, the 94th percentile.

So the mechanism the book once offered and then cut down does describe one player exactly. Trouba, Letang, Parayko, Marcus Pettersson and Mike Hoffman all slapped a third of what they threw and got nothing from range; Stamkos slapped a third and converted at four times the rate.

The honest reading is that forty-two shots is a small sample and this is what the tail of a distribution looks like. The correlation across the league is r = 0.291; a correlation of 0.291 does not mean nobody beats it, it means most people do not. Stamkos is the man who does, and one man is not a mechanism.

What is not sample is the power play: fourteen of his 34 goals came on it, from the left circle, and that shot has been the most recognisable single thing in the league for fifteen years.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 193 pounds. Top speed 22.5 mph at the 62nd percentile, 1.0 bursts above twenty a game at the 52nd, 2.76 miles a game at the 65th.

An ordinary tracking line at thirty-three, which is a better outcome than the two ankle injuries in his twenties made likely.

46 penalty minutes in 81 games and 597 in 1,003 career games. He is not a physical forward; the penalties are the frustration of a man who has been the most-watched player on the ice since he was eighteen.

He wins his position in the circle and does not surrender it, which is the whole physical requirement of the job he does on the power play, and it is why the one-timer still arrives.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2008, fifteen seasons, 1,003 games, 1,056 points, all of them here, two Stanley Cups, and the captaincy.

515 goals at a career 16.8 per cent, and 195 power-play goals. A 51-goal season in 2009-10 and 60 in 2011-12.

He is thirty-three, has played a thousand games for one club, and last season was his best in four years.

What this file is worth to the book beyond that is the long-range shooting: the one clean counter-example to a finding this edition has spent five chapters establishing, and the reason the finding is stated as a correlation rather than a law.