Tomas Nosek

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

7 goals and 11 assists in 66 games — 18 points — for Boston, at 12:33 a night. Plus-9, 69 shots at 10.1 per cent, two shorthanded goals, 48 penalty minutes.

And then the number this report exists for.

He was on the ice for 39 five-on-five faceoffs in the attacking zone and 272 in his own. That is 12.5 per cent, and no skater in this book with three hundred five-on-five minutes started fewer of his shifts in the attacking end. The next man down the list is four points behind him.

46.1 per cent of the expected goals across 657 minutes, the 28th percentile, which given where every shift began is a considerably better result than it looks.

His ice finished 20-14 against an expectation of 22.2-25.94 — twelve goals better than the chances at the defensive end, and that is Linus Ullmark, who posted the best save percentage in the league.

Eight seasons, 398 games, 101 points.

The Finesse Game

69 shots at a median of 23 feet, 44 per cent of them from inside twenty.

Inside twenty: 29 shots on goal and 4 goals, 13.79 per cent. Twenty to forty: 24 shots, 2 goals. Beyond forty: 15 shots, 1 goal.

Seven goals on 69 shots is a fair return for the volume and there is no argument to make in either direction about it.

59 wrist shots out of 92 tracked attempts and two slap shots. 81.0 mph at the 3rd percentile, which on two slap shots is a measurement of what he picks rather than of what he has.

Eleven assists. He is not the man the play goes through and never has been; what he is asked to do is get the puck to the red line.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 199, with 48 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.2 mph, the 44th percentile; 0.8 bursts a game, the 44th; 1.93 miles a game, the 13th. League-average speed on very low mileage — twelve minutes a night, all of it in short bursts out of his own end.

He kills penalties, takes the draw at the wrong end of the rink, and wins pucks along the wall against men who are bigger.

The two shorthanded goals in sixty-six games are the small dividend of the role, and the role is the entire file.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Pardubice, and 398 NHL games later.

Vegas signed him for the expansion season and he has been a fourth-line centre or left wing ever since, through 42 goals and a career that has never once been about scoring.

And here is the thing worth carrying out of this chapter. Boston won sixty-five games last season, the most in the history of the league, and three of the five most defensively deployed forwards in this book played on it: Nosek at 12.5 per cent, Garnet Hathaway at 17.9 and Nick Foligno at 20.2. All three are on other clubs now. Whatever that fourth line was worth, its own organisation did not pay to keep it, and New Jersey got the most extreme of the three.