Teddy Blueger

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

4 goals and 12 assists in 63 games — 16 points — at 12:55 a night between Pittsburgh and Vegas. Minus-9, 85 shots at 4.7 per cent, 30 penalty minutes.

He started 19.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone — the 1st percentile, and the fourth-lowest of the 524 skaters in this book who played six hundred minutes: 67 attacking draws against 284 defensive ones.

Sixty-seven. That is the number to sit with. Four times out of five that he was sent out for an end-zone faceoff, it was in his own end.

47 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 675 minutes, the 26th percentile, with his ice at 19-32 against an expectation of 25.49-28.81 — six fewer goals scored than the chances called for and three more allowed.

Getting to the 26th percentile out of the 1st percentile of starts is a good season, and the minus-9 is what it looks like to the people who do not check.

The Finesse Game

85 shots at a median of 19 feet, with 53 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 44 shots on goal and three goals — 6.82 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 19 shots and one goal, 5.26 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 21 shots and none.

Below the rate everywhere, and badly below it from the slot — 6.82 per cent on forty-four shots is barely a third of what the league gets.

105 tracked attempts, 59 of them wrist shots, 16 backhands and four slap. His shot is measured at 81.2 mph, the 3rd percentile.

35 goals in 268 career games at 9.7 per cent says he is a better finisher than last season showed, but the shot speed says the ceiling was never high.

Five shorthanded goals in 268 games is the offensive number that matters in this file, because it is produced by the same thing the zone starts are: he is on the ice when the other club has the puck.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 185 pounds, with 30 penalty minutes in 63 games and 96 in 268 career games.

Top speed 22.7 mph at the 71st percentile, 1.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 65th, and 1.99 miles a game at the 15th — which is thirteen minutes of ice time rather than idleness.

Quicker than the role suggests, which is what a defensive centre needs to get out of his own end at all.

He kills penalties and takes the defensive-zone draw, and the 19.1 per cent zone-start figure is the clearest single piece of evidence for that anywhere in this book — though it records where he starts rather than who wins the faceoff, which the data cannot see.

He is defensively responsible in the way the phrase is supposed to mean: he is put on the ice specifically because the puck is in the wrong place, and the club’s chance share barely moves.

He is not physical and does not need to be at 185 pounds; the job is stick position and timing.

The Intangibles

Fifty-second overall in 2012, the second round, five seasons, 268 games, 98 points across Pittsburgh and Vegas.

35 goals and 63 assists, and a plus-22.

He is twenty-nine, a Latvian centre and one of very few in the league, signed by a club that finished twenty-fourth in chance share and has needed a fourth-line centre for years.

A plus-22 across a career spent almost entirely in his own zone is the sentence that describes him. He will score fifteen points, he will take the hardest starts on the roster, and he will make Elias Pettersson’s job easier in a way no box score records.