Adam Pelech

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

6 goals and 15 assists in 61 games — 21 points — at 21:39 a night, the most ice time of any Islander. Plus-15, 97 shots, 36 penalty minutes.

52.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 67th percentile, from 296 attacking-zone draws against 431 in his own end — 40.7 per cent, the 14th percentile.

That pair of numbers is the argument for him and it does not need any help. Every other defenceman on this club who posted a share above fifty was handed the good end of the rink to do it; he did it from the 14th percentile of deployment, in the heaviest minutes on the team, against the other club’s best line.

His ice finished 47-40 against an expectation of 47.27-43.54.

Eight seasons, 442 games, 124 points, and a career plus-77.

The Finesse Game

97 shots at a median of 55 feet, 79 per cent of them from beyond forty, and six goals.

Beyond forty: 66 shots on goal and 2 goals, 3.03 per cent, at the positional rate. Six shots all season from inside twenty.

There is no offence to write about and the file has never needed one. What matters is the outlet: 99 career assists against 25 goals, and the first pass out of trouble is the reason a pairing that starts in its own end does not stay there.

94 wrist shots and 37 slap out of 152 tracked attempts. 96.8 mph at the 87th percentile, on that slap count, so the reading holds — and it has produced twenty-five goals in eight seasons, which is the point about shot speed in a nutshell.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 212, with 36 penalty minutes in sixty-one games.

Top speed 21.9 mph, the 32nd percentile; 0.4 bursts a game, the 21st; 2.88 miles a game, the 72nd.

Below the league in speed, well above it in ground covered — the shape this book keeps finding in men who play twenty-two minutes a night against good players and almost never sprint.

He defends with gap control and a stick that is always in the lane, blocks shots, and clears his crease without needing to hit anybody to do it. The career plus-77 from a man with 124 points is what that looks like added up.

What the tracking cannot tell you, and what the deployment does, is that he is the defenceman this club sends over the boards when the puck is in the wrong end and it does not want to talk about it.

The Intangibles

Sixty-fifth overall in 2012, the third round, and 442 games without ever playing for another club.

Sixty-one games last season and 38 in 2019-20 are the two interruptions in a decade, and the file’s only real risk is that a defenceman who plays this many hard minutes accumulates them.

He is twenty-nine. There is no offensive upside here and there never was; what there is is the most valuable thing on the roster after the goaltender, and the club has known it longer than anybody outside it has.