Viktor Arvidsson

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

26 goals and 33 assists in 77 games — 59 points — with ten on the power play. Minus-4, 17:06 a night, 228 shots at 11.4 per cent, 24 penalty minutes.

55.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 87th percentile, with his ice at 41-39 against an expectation of 50.12-40.44 — nine goals short of the chances at the offensive end, which is where the minus-4 comes from on a line that controlled the play.

His two Los Angeles seasons are 49 and 59 points, which is the second-best two-year run of a nine-season career. The best was 2016-17 and 2017-18 in Nashville, 61 and 61.

Nine seasons, 528 games, 347 points.

The Finesse Game

228 shots at a median of 30 feet, 27 per cent from inside twenty and 24 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 52 shots on goal, 4 goals, 7.69 per cent. Inside forty: 171 shots, 21 goals, 12.28 per cent.

Two hundred and twenty-eight shots from seventeen minutes a night is a very high rate — second per minute among Kings forwards, behind Kaliyev — and it has been his method for nine years. He shot 246 and 247 times in consecutive Nashville seasons at twenty-three and twenty-four.

99.6 mph at the 96th percentile, from a 5-10, 181-pound winger. He took forty slap shots, which is a high count for a small forward and enough for the measurement to mean something. The shot is genuinely heavy; it is also the case that this reading rises with slap-shot volume and falls with everything else, so it says he picks the slap shot as much as it says he can drive it.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 181 — one of the smaller regular forwards in the league, and he plays as though he is not.

Top speed 23.2 mph, the 89th percentile; bursts 1.3 a game, the 67th; 2.60 miles a game, the 53rd.

He goes to the net and takes the punishment for it, which at 181 pounds is why he has played fewer than sixty games in four of his nine seasons.

Twenty-four penalty minutes in seventy-seven games. He takes the hit and does not answer it.

The Intangibles

One hundred and twelfth overall in 2014, drafted at twenty-one after four seasons in Sweden, and 173 NHL goals since.

47.1 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 34th percentile.

He is thirty and the body has already been a problem for six seasons. The shooting rate, the deployment and the chance share all say the production is real; the games played are the thing that will decide what the last third of the career looks like.