Trevor Zegras

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

23 goals and 38 assists in 75 games — 61 points at 17:54 a night, minus-21, with 9 power-play goals on 181 shots, converting at 12.7 per cent, and 50 penalty minutes.

Sixty-one points in a first full season, at twenty. 74 points in 99 career games is the entire argument for what Anaheim is doing.

52.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,077 minutes, the 68th percentile, and 2.31 even-strength points per 60, the 76th. His ice went 50-51 against an expectation of 48.31-44.36 — two goals of finishing ahead of the chances, and nearly seven more conceded than they predicted.

Both wingers are gone. With Rickard Rakell he took 56.7 per cent of the expected goals across 954 attempts; apart from Rakell, 48.1. With Sonny Milano, 54.1 across 920. Rakell was sold to Pittsburgh in March and Milano signed in Washington in the summer. The 52.1 was a line’s number, and the line no longer exists.

The Finesse Game

181 attempts at a median of 25 feet, 36 per cent from inside 20 and 20 per cent from beyond 40, at 87.8 mph — the 33rd percentile of shot velocity. He scores from placement and from arriving late, not from beating a goaltender clean.

38 assists against 23 goals, and the assists are the honest half. He carries the puck through the neutral zone rather than chipping it in, and he holds it a beat longer than the play wants. 3.17 giveaways per 60 is among the highest figures for a forward in the league — the same instinct produces the seam pass and the turnover at the line, and at twenty-one nobody has yet asked him to tell them apart.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 185. 2.50 hits per 60 is the 28th percentile and 1.21 blocks the 24th; he is not part of how this club defends and is not being asked to be.

He drew 1.25 penalties per 60, the 85th percentile, and finished plus-0.36 on penalties drawn against taken, the 79th — the puck is on his stick often enough that stopping him legally is difficult.

He covered 10.69 miles per sixty minutes of ice, the 99th percentile among the league’s forwards, at a top speed of 23.1 mph, the 86th. That combination — always moving, genuinely quick — is rarer than either half of it.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2019, and the first Anaheim forward since Getzlaf and Perry that people outside California will pay to watch.

He turns 22 in March, on a club that won 31 games. The risk is not the talent. It is that a young player learns what winning costs from the room he is in, and this room lost 37 games and then sold its three best veterans. Anaheim also has to settle whether he is a centre before the second contract makes the question expensive.