William Karlsson

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

14 goals and 39 assists in 82 games — 53 points — at 17:28 a night. Plus-14, 161 shots at 8.7 per cent, two on the power play, two shorthanded, 10 penalty minutes.

Ten penalty minutes in eighty-two games is the lowest total of any forward in this chapter who played a full season.

54.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 79th percentile — the best of any forward on this roster who played more than a thousand minutes — across 1,108 minutes, with his ice at 47-38 against an expectation of 50.78-42.95.

Four fewer goals scored than the chances called for and five fewer allowed. The chances were good and the finishing at his end was not.

He started 51.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 55th percentile.

The Finesse Game

161 shots at a median of 25 feet, and 236 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 64 shots on goal and seven goals — 10.94 per cent, well below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 71 shots and five goals, 7.04 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 21 shots and two goals.

Below the rate from both bands that carry the volume, on a hundred and thirty-five shots on goal. That is a bad finishing season and it is not the first.

44 backhands out of 236 attempts — an 18.6 per cent share, one of the highest of any centre in this book — and fourteen slap shots. 90.0 mph at the 43rd percentile.

And then there is 2017-18: 43 goals on 184 shots at 23.4 per cent, in the expansion season, at twenty-five. He has scored 79 goals in the 350 games since, on 714 shots, at 11.1 per cent.

The honest reading is the one nobody enjoys. A career 12.4 per cent across 615 games includes that one season; strip it out and he is 97 goals on 947 shots — 10.2 per cent — and he has never scored more than 24 in any other year. The 43 was the outlier. The player is the rest of it, and the rest of it is very good.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190 pounds, with 10 penalty minutes in 82 games and 86 in 615 career games — a seventh of a penalty minute a game across nine seasons.

2.4 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 91st percentile, at a top speed of 23.0 mph, the 86th, on 2.87 miles a game at the 72nd.

Genuinely fast and constantly at speed, from a centre who plays seventeen minutes a night against other clubs’ best lines.

Eighty-six penalty minutes in six hundred games from a defensive centre is an extraordinarily low rate.

He kills penalties and reads the breakout, and eleven career shorthanded goals are what a fast centre with a good stick collects doing it.

He is not physical and does not finish checks; the defensive work is anticipation and speed.

The Intangibles

Fifty-third overall in 2011, the second round, nine seasons, 615 games, 357 points across Anaheim, Columbus and Vegas, and a Stanley Cup.

140 goals and 217 assists, and a plus-101.

He is thirty, one of the last men here from the expansion draft, and has spent six seasons being the club’s most trusted defensive centre while being remembered for one offensive season.

That is the file, and it is a compliment. A 79th-percentile chance share at seventeen minutes a night against top lines, ten penalty minutes a year and eleven shorthanded goals is a genuinely valuable player. The 43 goals were never coming back and they were never the point.