With his two-goal effort in Buffalo on Monday, Wilson hit 18, tying last season’s output before this one is even half over. Whatever expectations had been made for the 30-year-old playing in his 12th season, he’s surpassed them. Suddenly, he’s in elite company.
Evolving Hockey has a model for measuring players called Goals Above Replacement, or GAR. The stat looks at different compartments of a player’s game and sums them up to estimate the player’s total value in a single number, relative to your bog-standard AHL call-up or “replacement-level” player.
Wilson’s GAR in 2024-25 is 14. That means nothing without context, so here’s the context:
| Player | GAR |
|---|---|
| Leon Draisaitl | 15.1 |
| Jack Eichel | 14.0 |
| Tom Wilson | 14.0 |
| Connor McDavid | 12.9 |
| Nick Suzuki | 12.7 |
| Nikita Kucherov | 12.5 |
| Mitch Marner | 12.2 |
| Sam Reinhart | 12.2 |
| Kirill Marchenko | 11.7 |
| Mark Stone | 11.5 |
Those are the top ten forwards by goals above replacement. Wilson ranks third. He’s above Connor McDavid.
Broken down by compartment, we see that Wilson is more well-rounded than those peers.
His value is a combination of even-strength offense (4.7 goals), even-strength defense (2.5 goals), the power play (3.6), the penalty kill (2.1), and drawing penalties (1.2). Other top-ten forwards, aside notably from Florida’s Sam Reinhart, get their value mostly from even-strength and power-play offense.
Tom Wilson as an elite multi-dimensional impact player may come as a surprise to his historical detractors, a group to which I once but no longer belong. Now, he’s a force on both sides of the puck, finding chemistry with lots of different Caps. Early in the season it was Connor McMichael, with whom Wilson has collaborated on ten goals.
It started with the home opener, when McMichael won a board battle below the goal line to find Wilson open in the slot.
That was one of the four goals in four games with which Wilson began the season, by going hard to the net after a strong cycle game. But Wilson has also been dangerous on the rush. At the beginning of November, Wilson and McMichael performed a zone entry together, with the latter cleaning up the former’s rebound.
It hasn’t been just with McMichael. He and Wilson haven’t played together much since the beginning of December, but Wilson has found other scoring partners. He’s combined with Dylan Strome and Jakob Chychrun on seven goals apiece. A lot of that production has come on the power play, which accounts for eight of his 18 goals. That’s the most on the Caps, three more than Ovechkin, though it must be noted that Wilson has shot 36.4 percent while a man up. But if you see where those shots are coming from, you can understand why he’s so dangerous.
It’s almost all from high danger areas – a place of punishment that TJ Oshie once called home. Now it’s Tom Wilson’s spot, and he’s thriving there. His power-play production combined with a career high in five-on-five rate of individual expected goals, Wilson’s playing at a level we haven’t seen before. I don’t think anyone expected it could even get to this level.
It’s hard to overstate how dramatic a reversal this has been. Wilson is here just one year after technically being a sub-replacement player during Washington’s dismal 2023-24 season.
It had been a scary drop-off following his ACL injury in May of 2022, compounded by Washington’s systemic diminishment. But even when the team was lowest, Wilson was already showing signs of improvement. Even then his speed had been gradually improving the further he got from his injury. Now, NHL Edge places him in the 96th percentile by top speed.
It’s more than a bounce-back, and it’s more than just playing through adversity. Lot of players get banged up and stay in the game. Wilson got banged up and is playing the best hockey of his life.
But there is an exception, a holdout on this Wilson hagiography. HockeyViz’s catch-all statistic, Synthetic Goals, or sG, is a measurement that looks like Evolving Hockey’s GAR, except it’s calculated in its own way. And it reckons Wilson is worth only plus-1.2 goals right now – a tiny fraction of the plus-14.0 reached by GAR. The big difference, HockeyViz’s Micah Blake McCurdy tells me, is smoothing. “Some aspects of sG are deliberately biased,” McCurdy says, “to give results that are closer to previous measurements.” So these last few miserable seasons are keeping the model from reacting too strongly to the recent success. HockeyViz’s approach creates a sense of continuity in a player’s performance over time – it’s like a suspicion about dramatic changes that occur from one season to the next.
And there has been nothing more dramatic than Wilson’s progression. Frankly, it’s unprecedented. It’s the kind of season that will have Team Canada bosses punching drywall next month. And if he keeps it up, I wonder if it might give trophy voters some pause this spring.
