Tom Wilson

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

13 goals and 9 assists in 33 games — 22 points — at 17:37 a night. Minus-13, 82 shots at 15.9 per cent, four on the power play, 78 penalty minutes.

Thirty-three games, after a knee injury the previous spring cost him the first half of the season.

42.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 6th percentile, across 446 minutes, with his ice at 20-28 against an expectation of 17.14-23.51.

He started 57.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 83rd percentile: 149 attacking draws against 110 defensive ones.

Four hundred and forty-six minutes is a third of a season and the 6th percentile out of soft starts is still an alarming row, on a club whose team share was twentieth.

The Finesse Game

82 shots at a median of 21 feet, with 57 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 38 shots on goal and 10 goals — 26.32 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 26 shots and two goals, 7.69 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 13 shots and one goal.

Thirteen goals in thirty-three games is a thirty-two-goal pace, and it follows 24 in 78 games and 13 in 47 — he has scored at better than a twenty-goal rate for five seasons running.

A career 12.1 per cent across 680 games, against 15.9 last season and 15.9 and 15.7 in the two before it. The finishing has been genuinely good for three years and the career rate has not caught up to it yet.

110 tracked attempts, 42 of them wrist shots and 19 tip-ins — a 17.3 per cent share. 89.7 mph at the 42nd percentile.

He goes to the net and nobody moves him, which is where a 26 per cent close-range rate comes from at 6-4 and 225 pounds.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 225 pounds, with 78 penalty minutes in 33 games and 1,299 in 680 career games — very nearly two penalty minutes a game across ten seasons.

Top speed 21.8 mph at the 25th percentile, 1.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 69th, 2.65 miles a game at the 57th. Not fast, and reaching speed more often than the top figure suggests.

He is punishing, he is nasty, he fights, and he takes liberties — and the 1,299 penalty minutes are the only part of that this project can measure. He is one of the most feared forwards in the league and has been suspended repeatedly for it.

He answers for his teammates, which on a club built around a thirty-eight-year-old captain has been an explicit part of the job for a decade.

The knee is the question the numbers cannot answer, and 33 games is what it cost.

The Intangibles

Sixteenth overall in 2012, ten seasons, 680 games, 295 points, all of them here, and a Stanley Cup.

128 goals and 167 assists, and a plus-31.

He is twenty-nine, on a long contract, and the club has just missed the playoffs for the first time since he arrived.

A power forward who scores at a twenty-goal rate, plays seventeen minutes a night and collects two penalty minutes a game is one of about four such players in the league. What the file cannot promise is the games: 33, 78, 47, 68 — the availability is the whole risk and the way he plays is the reason.