Sheng Peng
Luke Kunin isn’t a play driver. But that’s okay.
He can still be an effective player on a winner, hence why he’s been a top-nine forward on three straight playoff teams. It’s also why the San Jose Sharks surrendered a 2023 third-round pick and prospect John Leonard for the winger during the most recent NHL Draft.
You wouldn’t guess that, of course, based on this graphic:
Here’s the first thing that catches my eye: The 24-year-old’s abysmal EV Offense and Defense, which “is an estimate of how a player impacts his team’s even strength scoring chance generation (or expected goals for)” or scoring chance prevention.
This suggests that Kunin is a black hole offensive and defensive liability. We’ll tackle each point separately, but let’s talk about offense first.
As JFreshHockey himself notes, Kunin “can score goals though.” That probably already makes him more useful than a “5 percentile” forward.
According to Evolving Hockey, Kunin’s 0.95 Goals Per 60 over the last three years is 67th among 412 NHL forwards (1000-plus 5v5 minutes). That’s a higher goal-scoring rate than Mika Zibanejad, Tomas Hertl, and Jack Eichel, to cherry pick a few names.
In fact, only Timo Meier, of all current San Jose Sharks forwards, has scored at a more regular 5-on-5 clip over the last three seasons than Kunin.
Now I’m not suggesting in any way that Kunin is a more complete player or even a more proficient goal scorer than the aforementioned stars. But the eye test also appears to agree that Kunin is better than “sub-replacement” at scoring goals, obviously a key hockey skill.
I watched the highlights from Kunin’s best goal-scoring campaign – 15 goals in 63 games in 2019-20 – and while there were a couple empty-netters, there weren’t as many garbage goals as you might expect:
“He has [underrated hands] and shot,” an NHL executive from outside the San Jose Sharks organization told San Jose Hockey Now.
“Sneaky good shot,” another NHL scout agreed. “Quick, hard release.”
In two of his last three seasons, Kunin has scored at a 20-goal pace.
The point: Kunin might not be great at creating scoring chances for himself or his teammates, but he can finish them. Again, he’s not a play driver, but not everybody is. So skate him with superior play drivers, mix different skills, and that’s how you form a cohesive line.
Another way of saying it: Joe Thornton, in his heyday, was one of the great play drivers of our generation. But if you played three Joe Thorntons together, who’s shooting the puck?
Of course, Kunin doesn’t have enough goalscoring ability by itself to be valuable just for that. But he’s got other skills – a backup game – that’s helped make him a playoff-caliber top-nine forward. We’ll get more into these other skills and how they’ll help the Sharks tomorrow.