Adam Fox

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

12 goals and 60 assists in 82 games — 72 points — at 24:23 a night. Plus-28, 159 shots, five game-winners, 34 penalty minutes.

55.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 89th percentile and the highest of any Ranger, across 1,459 minutes, with his ice at 69-47 against an expectation of 68.83-55.02 — the goals for arrived exactly as the chances said and the goals against came in eight better.

He started 56.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 78th percentile, 485 attacking draws against 378.

Four seasons, 285 games, 235 points, and a career plus-87. He has never had a season below plus-18.

The Finesse Game

159 shots at a median of 41 feet, which is fifteen feet closer than most defencemen in this book, and that is the file.

Inside twenty feet: 29 shots on goal and 7 goals — 24.14 per cent. From twenty to forty: 51 shots and 3 goals. Beyond forty: 77 shots and 2 goals, 2.60 per cent, below the positional rate of 3.17.

He is a poor long shooter and a very good close one, which for a defenceman means he walks into the slot rather than firing from the blue line. Twenty-nine shots on goal from inside twenty feet is a large number for the position.

160 of his 220 tracked attempts are wrist shots and 19 are slap shots — an 8.6 per cent slap share, among the lowest of any defenceman in the league who shoots at this volume. 90.0 mph at the 43rd percentile, which on nineteen slap shots is not a reading of anything.

And then the assists. Sixty in a season and 199 in 285 career games. The whole game is the pass: he holds the puck at the line until a defender commits, and everything the Rangers do at even strength on his ice begins there.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 185 pounds, and the tracking is the most extreme version of a shape this book has had to learn to read.

Top speed 21.1 mph, the 4th percentile. Bursts above twenty miles an hour, 0.2 a game — the 4th percentile. Distance covered, 3.30 miles a game, the 93rd.

Bottom five per cent of the league in both measures of speed and the top decile in mileage, from a man playing twenty-four and a half minutes a night. That is not a verdict, it is the job description — twenty-four minutes is a great deal of skating and almost none of it needs to be a sprint — but it is the most pronounced case of it in the edition.

What it means is that everything he does defensively has to happen before the play arrives. He defends with position, angle and stick, closes gaps by anticipating them, and is never in a footrace because he has already decided where the puck is going.

He is 185 pounds and does not clear his crease. Thirty-four penalty minutes in eighty-two games from a defenceman with these minutes is the other half of the same sentence.

The Intangibles

Sixty-sixth overall in 2016 to Calgary, then Carolina, then the Rangers, all of it before he had played a professional game — and a Norris Trophy in his second season.

235 points in 285 games and a career plus-87, all of it from a 5-11 defenceman in the bottom five per cent of the league for measured speed.

This book has a standing interest in small defencemen who dominate, and he is the least athletic of them and the most effective. Makar and Hughes do it with skating; he does it entirely without. What that means for how the file ages is genuinely unclear — a game built on reading the play has no obvious decline curve, and no comparable measurements exist for the men who played it before him.