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Smith, Macklin Celebrini, Alex Wennberg, Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky, NHL scouts, and Stathletes micro-stats explain how the No. 4 pick of the 2023 draft has improved.

“More assertive offensively,” Scout No. 1 said.

Everyone can see that Smith is more confident with the puck than he was last season, and the micro-stats back it up.

Zone Entries

Smith is creating a lot more offense on a typical 5-on-5 zone entry now.

According to Stathletes, he’s an 89 percentile expected threat among all NHL forwards on a zone entry now, far more dangerous than last year’s 65 percentile.

Entries xThreat are “expected goals created (from passing or carrying) off of zone entry attempts.”

“I think that's something that he's worked on and understands when he has time to make a play and when he doesn't, and he's got real good feel for that,” Warsofsky said.

“It's definitely intentional,” Smith said. “Last year was my first year playing wing, so you obviously don't get more puck touches coming through the middle, as you do as a center. So this year, I wanted to have more controlled entries.”

“We've seen it all year that he can make those plays off entries,” Warsofsky said. “He's done a really good job of, I think the game has probably slowed down for him to make those plays. His vision is elite.”

“It sets up a lot,” Smith said. “I think when you're delaying off a zone entry, it definitely creates more than just chipping it in. But there's a time and place for everything.”

Puck Carries

You don’t need to be a bull in a china shop to attack the most dangerous areas of ice.

The crafty 6-foot Smith is learning where and when to slip into the soft spots at 5-on-5.

“When you're in tight, you gotta get your head up and find where everyone is,” he said.

Smith is a 96 percentile forward in Slot Carries and 80 percentile in Inner Slot Carries, according to Stathletes, a much higher volume than last year’s 79 and 57 percentiles, respectively.

Because Smith isn’t the most physical of forwards, there’s a perception that he’s a perimeter player, which isn’t the case.

“You get a lot of offense just kind of within that five feet from the net,” Smith said. “A lot of goals come from there.”

Puck Recovery

More subtle, but still important, Smith is creating a lot more offense off 5-on-5 puck recoveries.

He’s a 77 percentile expected threat on a puck recovery now, a significant improvement from last year’s 41 percentile.

Recovery xThreat is “expected goals created by recovering loose pucks”

“When he's skating, he's engaged, that's when he's usually making plays,” Warsofsky said.

Shooting

Smith is sniffing out soft spots in the OZ like a truffle pig.

“Quiet, then finds open ice,” Scout No. 2 said.

He’s a 90 percentile in Slot Shots volume, a 51 percentile last year.

Part of that is getting lost in the offensive zone when his linemates are on the cycle: Smith is 94 percentile in xG on Cycle Shots, after being a 41 percentile forward last year.

“[Timing when you show] up in the slot is when you get the best chances,” Smith said.

These improvements, coupled with small gains in where Smith was already high-end at — last year, he was already close to a 90 percentile forward in Passing and Rush Offense — have led to a dramatically more dangerous attacker.

“His skill’s always gonna be there, he’s just getting a little more comfortable,” Celebrini said.

“Last year, you [could] see the skill he had and the awareness to make plays, but right now, I think he elevated it a little bit more,” Wennberg said. “His poise with the puck and his confidence with it.”

At the heart of this is Smith’s impeachable hockey IQ, which helps him process the game as quickly as his superstar center and best friend Celebrini.

“Their hockey sense is very similar as far as the way they see the ice and the way they see plays develop,” Warsofsky said. “The biggest thing is they see the ice well, and they can see plays develop before 90 percent of the league.”

“It's about how quick you can read the play, where you can be,” Wennberg said. “That's where I think [Smith’s] hockey IQ is just elite.”

Warsofsky admitted, “You could go through Mack and Will's shifts and show them video. And even if it's a mistake in my eyes, they can tell you what they were thinking and maybe what play they wanted to make, and then you can see it.”

“He's just more comfortable,” Celebrini said. “We're just more comfortable with each other. The more you're used to someone, the more you can play off them, the quicker decisions you can make.”

“They complement [each other] really well, just the way they play,” Wennberg said. “It's a perfect match, for sure.”

All this leads to a couple key Stathletes numbers: Smith leads all Sharks in Individual Expected Goals Per 60, in All Situations. This tells you that Smith is going to the danger areas.

And he’s 16th in the NHL with 1.91 High Danger Chances Per 60, which is a combination of high-danger scoring chance shots and assists.

That’s highest on the Sharks, and just behind great company like Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid, Nikita Kucherov, and Kirill Kaprizov, to name a handful. Smith is just ahead of fellow young guns Cole Caulfield and Connor Bedard.

There’s still a lot, of course, to improve in his all-around game.

He’s a below-average defensive forward, according to Stathletes.

“Habits off the puck still not there,” Scout No. 1 said.

He needs to become stronger and quicker, both to evade pressure and improve puck protection. This will also help him become a more reliable puck transporter, from blueline to blueline.

But Smith is on the cusp of greatness.

“Second year is not always easy, a lot more pressure and expectations on you,” Wennberg said. “The way he's handling it and how he's been playing, it's been going really well.”

In Season 4, Vecna’s monstrous form was created almost entirely with prosthetics designed by Barrie Gower. The initial makeup test took 10 hours, a process the team eventually reduced to about six and a half. For Season 5, Gower, visual effects supervisor Betsy Paterson and the Duffer Brothers reimagined “Vecna 2.0” with a combination of prosthetics and visual effects, which reduced Bower’s time in the makeup chair to three hours.

“He was to be seen as a much bigger threat this time and made up of a twisted mass of large, pulsating vines,” Gower says. “It’s like the essence and the power of the Upside Down is pumping through him. Matt and Ross were very keen that we had Jamie’s head and shoulders and it would be a true performance from Jamie in a prosthetic.”

“At the end of Season 4, he gets burned and thrown out a window and he has re-created himself,” Paterson adds. “There’s still just a little bit of human left. We needed to feel that he is now his own creation. The facial performance is all Jamie and everything else is based on his body performance.”

Costume designer Amy Parris built lifts into Bower’s shoes to help him look taller and the team added padding under his arms to emphasize Vecna’s more imposing stance. Paterson and Gower used visual references from porcupines to animal embryonic sacks. Vecna’s form is charred and the vines that compose his body can be seen pulsating like they are alive. The team looked at a lot of images of barbecued meat during the design process, and even took a blowtorch to steak to experiment with color and texture. (“Our Google search history was just awful,” Paterson says. “But you want to really sell it.”)

“We wanted to strip away even more of his humanity,” Ross Duffer explains. “If he was 50% human and 50% monster last year, this season we pushed him closer to 70% monster.”

Mr. Whatsit is more composed than Vecna. The Duffers imagined him as a creepy Mr. Rogers, so Parris incorporated a 1950s Gregory Peck-style suit. She added a hat and glasses to make him seem more approachable.

“He was very influenced by Dr. Brenner, so I liked the warm brown wool fabric because it reminded me how Brenner started off a little friendlier,” Parris says, referring to the villainous authority figure played by Matthew Modine. “We gave him red socks, which a man of the ’50s probably wouldn’t have normally worn. That was a little nod for me and Jamie because he’s red inside. The red in the tie and the socks imply that he’s hiding underneath all that.”

In Episode 5, the villain shifts between Mr. Whatsit, the blood-splattered orderly and Vecna as he chases Holly (Nell Fisher) and Max (Sadie Sink). The scene was shot multiple times over two days with Bower in each costume and makeup setup, with the actor repeating the exact movement for each version of the character so the VFX team could morph them together.

“I had an earpiece in my ear counting out the beats,” Bower says. “I remember walking on set and there was a pervasive nervous energy. But we could feel when we got it.”

“The Duffers wanted to lean into the psychic horror of it,” Paterson adds. “Jamie did a great job of making sure we could easily flicker between the performances. We can do the most incredible effects in the world, but if the underlying performance doesn’t work it’s never going to come together.”

In the finale, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the Hawkins gang defeat Vecna inside the Mind Flayer, which was created with both set builds and CGI. The battle took three years to plan and execute, and it culminates with Joyce (Winona Ryder) decapitating Vecna with an axe after he’s been impaled. First, they shot it with Bower present so he could react to Joyce. “I had to prop myself against this foam spike in front of my colleagues and friends, and then have Winona come up and chop my head off, which was incredible,” Bower says. “It was uncomfortable, but it was actually a very moving moment for me.”

The team then shot the scene with Ryder hitting a pad. Visual effects company Weta created the effect of Vecna’s head detaching from his body. “They had a blast,” Paterson says. “They were chopping things up in parking lots and trying to get a feel for what would happen. He gets hit six or seven times before his head actually falls off, so they had to make it believable that there’s enough sinew and bone in his neck. She’s not the strongest person, so it would take a lot for her to chop his head fully off.”

Although Vecna is bent on total destruction in the show, Bower never thought of him as a villain.

“I haven’t put anything out into the world that felt like I put so much of myself into it in a number of years. I’m feeling all the things and very excited because I feel really proud of it,” says Jacobson, whose married Carson falls for Greta while her husband is away at war. Jacobson — perhaps best known as one half of the hilarious, charming duo of best friends in Broad City (along with Ilana Glazer) who smoked weed, got into shenanigans, and loved each other deeply above all — says she’s nervous about League dropping because she cares so much about the show that’s been in the works since before the pandemic.

“This one is about a lot of big, important things — stories [that are] inspired by real people. And there’s a responsibility behind that,” she says.

“It’s also, you know, a reimagining of people’s favorite movie,” she adds with a knowing laugh.

For Jacobson, who first spoke publicly about being bisexual in 2018, the queer series is personal. It features queer femmes, butches, Black queer characters, trans folks, and several characters on a gender spectrum like the players and friends Jess (Kelly MacCormack) and Lupe (Vida and Fun Home’s Roberta Colindrez), one character representing Latinx players denied their stories.

Jacobson was just a kid when the film came out, but she remembers it fondly. It was the first time she felt validated in movies or TV as a girl who was into sports. For fans of the movie who may have trepidation about a “remake,” Jacobson assures the series isn’t that and it’s so much more.

“This movie does not need to be remade, but the stories of this generation of women who not only dreamed of playing baseball but were fucking good at it were not fully told in the film, right? The real estate of a two-hour film versus [that] of a television show to really show those marginalized stories and the stories that the film overlooked [makes a difference],” Jacobson says. “Some of the aspects of that league that were overlooked in the film, we thought were really important. I don’t think of it as a remake…the movie will be right over here whenever you want to watch it. And ours, hopefully, can exist right next to it. [The series] is expanding the lens a little bit to show more stories of athletes at the time.”

For Chanté Adams, who plays Max, a church-raised young woman who works at her mother’s hair salon while dreaming of the big leagues (and has a fling with the preacher’s wife on the side), A League of Their Own is part of her mission to share untold stories.

“When I envision my perfect career, this is the type of work that I want to continue to keep on doing,” Adams says about playing a character who pays homage to three Black women ballplayers in the Negro Leagues who never got their due — Toni Stone, Connie Morgan, and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson.

“Through this story, I feel like I’m honoring my family. I feel like I’m honoring my ancestors. I’m from Detroit. I’m a Midwestern girl. My dad is a historian, our family historian, and so [our story] involves the great migration and moving up from the South to find a better life in these factories,” Adams says.

Max is also queer and later discovers that her mother’s sibling was ostracized by the family for being trans — a story that resonates with Adams.

“When we [Adams, Jacobson, Graham] sat down and talked, I told them about…an uncle that was estranged from the family because he was gay. And he was Black. And it was the ’40s,” Adams says. “He ended up moving to San Francisco. I don’t know much about him; all I know [is] that his name was accurate. And I’ve been trying to research and find as much information on him as I can these past couple of years. [The creators] so graciously allowed the father of my character to be named Edgar in honor of my uncle, who passed away back in the ’80s.”

Max’s uncle represents an LGBTQ+ person of a silent generation making their own community, while the queer women of the central team, the Rockford Peaches, discover one another through friendship and romance. The love story that unfolds between Carson and Greta is sure to become a fan favorite. A queer femme, Greta, along with a friend and chosen family member, team slugger Jo (Melanie Field), has found a code to survive in a time when being queer could land a person in jail and ostracized from society. But others are queer too, including Lupe and Jess. And O’Donnell turns up halfway through the series playing someone who is queer and finally gets to say it, unlike her 1992 character.

Adams, who starred in the Laverne Cox vehicle Bad Hair, isn’t surprised by the nuanced storytelling, given the care taken behind the scenes to ensure as many voices as possible were represented. She recalls meeting the folks in the writers’ room over Zoom. “I got choked up…. There were Black women, queer people, trans people. It was exactly how it should be when doing a show of this caliber and in doing a show that is going to be representing so many different groups of people,” she says, adding that the makeup of the writers’ room is also reflected across the set.

“I’ve never been on a show that had this many queer people and this many people of color,” she adds.

If the fact that several Peaches in the series and many women from the other teams are queer (many of whom Lupe and Jess get to know intimately) seems like an outsized number, AAGPBL player Maybelle Blair, who came out publicly at 95 at a screening of the series at Tribeca in June, begs to differ.

“Out of 650 [players], I bet you 400 was gay,” Blair, who was dubbed “all the way May” for her prowess on the diamond, said at a panel for the series at the Frameline Film Festival a week after coming out.

“It was wonderful.… So many of the girls came in from the farms and they came in from all over the United States. And a lot of them thought they were alone too. And we had quite a time. There were so many gays in the league. It was amazing. Oh, but you know…let’s face it, we’re good athletes,” she said.

The series leans into a lot of joy — of playing ball, of finding love, and friendship. But it’s not naïve about the real threat of being found out as a queer person, a line that the charismatic and flirty Greta cautiously straddles.

“Those days…you wouldn’t dare be caught being gay. You have no idea how fearful it was. A lot of the girls that were in the service would come and visit us as our friends,” Blair says in a phone interview. “I had a lot of friends [who were] kicked out of the service on account of being gay. We had to be very careful.”

A League of Their Own has been in the works for about five years, and Jacobson met Blair in 2018. Between the time Blair came on board as a consultant — she’s now an integral part of the show’s press and screening tour — the documentary A Secret Love, about AAGPBL player Terry Donahue and her wife, Pat Henschel, wowed viewers on Netflix. Donahue, who died in 2019, was a friend of Blair’s. The relationship that developed between Blair and the show’s creative team became a critical piece of the series and a living example of the power of storytelling.

“We were developing the show and we sort of told her about our own lives. And she shared with us. It was important because she had not come out publicly until Tribeca,” Jacobson says. “I felt so privileged that she did that with us and felt that trust between us.”

While the series touches on difficult issues of race, gender presentation, queerness, and women’s rights, she sees it ultimately as one of joy in our current times when conservative politicians are seeking to shove queer people back into the shadows with anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

“I feel honored to tell those stories that were kept a secret,” Jacobson says. “And hope that that they might inspire people to feel like they’re not alone, wherever they are, if it is a place that is not accepting.”

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This story is part of The Advocate’s 2022 History issue, which is out on newsstands August 30. To get your own copy directly, support queer media and subscribe — or download yours for Amazon, Kindle, Nook, or Apple News.