William Nylander

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

40 goals and 47 assists in 82 games — 87 points — at 18:33 a night. Plus-10, 293 shots at 13.7 per cent, nine on the power play, five game-winners, 28 penalty minutes.

Forty goals is a career high by six and 87 points a career high by seven, in his eighth season.

57.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 95th percentile, across 1,146 minutes, with his ice at 64-43 against an expectation of 64.40-47.28.

He started 64.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 97th percentile.

The Finesse Game

293 shots at a median of 26 feet, and 404 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 123 shots on goal and 27 goals — 21.95 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 115 shots and eight goals, 6.96 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 56 shots and six goals, 10.71, against a league rate of 4.16.

That middle band is the oddity. A hundred and fifteen shots on goal from the mid-slot returned eight goals, which is a little over half the rate the league manages, and he was two and a half times the rate from beyond forty on half the volume.

Read across, it is a shooting record with a hole in the middle of it. There is no obvious reason for a hole in that particular band, and the honest answer is that one season is not a large enough sample to demand one.

A 13.7 per cent shooting percentage against a career 12.3 across 521 games.

47 slap shots and 43 backhands out of 404 attempts. 95.0 mph at the 78th percentile. The shot is genuinely hard, and the release is quicker than the velocity suggests — though that second half is a reading rather than a measurement.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 200 pounds, with 28 penalty minutes in 82 games and 134 in 521 career games.

1.7 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 78th percentile, at a top speed of 22.6 mph, the 70th, on 2.84 miles a game at the 71st. Above average on every measure and outstanding on none.

He is not a physical player, and the standing criticism of him has always been engagement rather than ability. A 95th-percentile chance share is a difficult thing to hold against him.

The skating is the offensive asset: he carries the puck through the neutral zone at speed and enters with it rather than dumping it, which is why the club’s best possession numbers follow him around.

The Intangibles

Eighth overall in 2014, eight seasons, 521 games, 430 points, all of them here.

177 goals at a career 12.3 per cent, with three of his last four seasons above 30 goals — 31, 34 and 40 — and the 17 in between coming in a 51-game season.

He is twenty-seven, on a club that has finished above a hundred points three years running.

What the file describes is a genuinely good scoring winger whose reputation has never quite caught up with his record, and a 40-goal season at twenty-six is the point at which it usually does.