Alec Martinez

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

3 goals and 11 assists in 77 games — 14 points — at 19:13 a night. Plus-30, 76 shots at 3.9 per cent, one shorthanded, 29 penalty minutes.

Seventy-seven games at thirty-five, after 26 the season before.

50.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,302 minutes, the 50th percentile, with his ice at 63-49 against an expectation of 55.31-54.28 — eight more goals scored than the chances called for and five fewer allowed, which is where a plus-30 out of a dead-even chance share comes from.

He started 46.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 31st percentile: 357 attacking draws against 414 defensive ones.

The Finesse Game

76 shots at a median of 54 feet, with 76 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 16 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 52 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: seven shots and one goal. Inside twenty: 16 shots and two goals.

And here is the cleanest single case this edition has produced. His shot is measured at 100.3 mph, the 97th percentile — the hardest on this roster and one of the fifteen hardest of any defenceman in this book — he slaps 21.4 per cent of his attempts, he took fifty-two shots on goal from beyond forty feet, and not one of them went in.

A hundred miles an hour, from the point, fifty-two times, for nothing.

This book spent an edition arguing itself out of the idea that shot velocity from the point buys goals. Alec Martinez is the sentence at the end of the argument.

79 goals in 763 career games at 7.2 per cent, and three last season.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 210 pounds, with 29 penalty minutes in 77 games and 236 in 763 career games.

A top speed of 21.3 mph, the 8th percentile, and 0.3 bursts above twenty a game, the 8th. He covers 2.55 miles a game, the 47th.

So Vegas’s second pair, at even strength, contained the slowest skater in this book and a thirty-five-year-old in the bottom tenth of the league beside him, and it held a fifty per cent chance share against the 31st percentile of starts.

He blocks shots, and the reputation was built over fourteen seasons and two Stanley Cups in Los Angeles.

He is punishing in front of his own net and the physical game has held up better than the feet.

The skating is gone. That is measured, not read, and it is what a thirty-five-year-old defenceman playing nineteen minutes a night is entitled to.

The Intangibles

Ninety-fifth overall in 2007, the fourth round, fourteen seasons, 763 games, 260 points across Los Angeles and Vegas, and three Stanley Cups — Los Angeles in 2012 and 2014, and here.

79 goals and 181 assists, and a plus-90.

He is thirty-six, and he scored the overtime goal that won the 2014 Final.

A fourth-round pick with seven hundred and sixty games and three Cups is a career almost nobody has had. The file now is a slow, willing, shot-blocking second-pair defenceman with fourteen points, and the club will take it for as long as the plus column holds.