Adam Fox

Last Season

Nine goals and 44 assists in 55 games — 53 points, plus-five, at 23:38 a night. Twenty-seven games missed.

The Finesse Game

The passing is the best of any defenceman in this book. Forty-four assists in 55 games is a full-season pace of sixty-five, and they are not power-play gifts — he makes the seam pass out of his own zone at speed, and he does it against forechecks designed to stop exactly that.

The shot is a means rather than an end: 155 unblocked attempts from a median of 51 feet, nine goals. He gets it through and looks for a tip.

The Physical Game

Five foot eleven and 185 pounds, and it is the whole of the risk. Twenty penalty minutes in 55 games of top-pair work. He cannot clear a crease and gets moved out of the front of his own net by any winger who wants the space.

Twenty-seven games missed, and this is the second season in three that has happened.

The Intangibles

Fifty-six per cent of the expected goals, 91st percentile, and 55.7 per cent of the shot attempts, 92nd — on a club that was 48 per cent as a team and finished 29th in even-strength expected goals for.

The gap between Fox and the next-best Ranger is enormous. The goals went 44-28 in his favour; nobody else here was close.

Fourteen points in his last ten. He is 28, a Norris winner, a sixty-sixth overall pick, and the reason this club’s defensive numbers look respectable at all.