The 2022-23 season was a breakout season for Pavel Zacha in many ways. In the summer of 2022, the New Jersey Devils decided that they did not want to extend him and traded him to the Bruins for Erik Haula. Zacha would then sign a one-year deal that he would flip into a four-year extension in January. On the wing, primarily alongside David Krejci and David Pastrnak, Zacha would put up career-highs in goals (21), assists (36), and points (57).
Beyond some of the more nuanced discussion, one of the high-level concerns regarding his production was his secondary assist rate. At 5v5, 16 of his 28 assists were secondary assists. Further to that, I found in my shot assist tracking that Zacha wasn’t producing primary shot assists at a high-level either, which is what you’d want to see out of a pass-first player. Long story short, it appeared that Zacha’s production was propped up by his teammates. For more, I dove into great detail this summer.
This season, we’ve seen a slight regression in both Zacha’s shooting percentage and secondary assist rate, but the drop isn’t dramatic. With three games remaining, Zacha has now set a new career-high in assists in all situations, is two goals shy of matching his goal total from last season, and is two points shy of a new career-high there.
Looking at just 5v5 production, Pavel Zacha’s points per 60 minutes of play has dropped from 2.53 to 2.29. About half of that is due to a drop in goal scoring from 0.88 to 0.76, while the rest lies in his secondary assist rate which dropped from 0.94 to 0.83. Without looking back at historical distributions, this doesn’t appear to be quite the feat, but it is.
From 2007-08 to present, I took all forward seasons who played 400 minutes at 5v5 and scored at least 20 points. The latter parameter may seem a bit cherry-picked, but I wanted to only observe top-nine forwards for this exercise. This gave me a population of 3,560 seasons.
Zacha’s 0.94 secondary assists per 60 last season ranked 34th in the population, and his drop this season is still well right of the mean.
Furthermore, there were 209 seasons where a forward had at least 0.70 secondary assists per 60 and fit the population the following season. On average, forwards saw their secondary assist rate cut by one-third, which would have brought Zacha to roughly 0.63. Zacha’s slight drop of 11.50% sits as quite an outlier.
There are only 10 seasons where a forward had a secondary assist rate of 0.70 or more and followed it up with a higher rate than where Zacha sits now. Three of those seasons belong to Henrik Sedin and two belong to Nikita Kucherov.
I don’t think there’s much to take from this outside of appreciating how big of an outlier Zacha’s follow-up season has been. I don’t think he has any rare playmaking skill like Sedin or Kucherov, and therefore, I expect this rate to fall at some point in the near future. We just don’t know when.