Alex Pietrangelo

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

11 goals and 43 assists in 73 games — 54 points — at 23:59 a night. Plus-13, 170 shots at 6.5 per cent, one on the power play, three game-winners, 16 penalty minutes.

54 points matches the best season of his career, set in 2017-18, at thirty-three.

51.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,326 minutes, the 61st percentile, with his ice at 63-52 against an expectation of 60.63-56.08.

He started 50.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 51st percentile: 441 attacking draws against 425 defensive ones. Dead even, at twenty-four minutes a night, on a club that won the Stanley Cup.

The Finesse Game

170 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 72 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 117 shots on goal and five goals — 4.27 per cent, above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 30 shots and one goal, 3.33 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: 14 shots and five goals, 35.71 per cent.

A hundred and seventeen shots on goal from beyond forty feet is the fourteenth-largest long-range volume of the 213 defencemen in this book, and it returned five goals — a rate a third above the league’s, which on that volume is worth about one extra goal across a season.

236 tracked attempts, 69 of them slap shots — a 29.2 per cent share — and a shot measured at 99.0 mph, the 95th percentile.

So Vegas’s first pair contains one of the three hardest shots in this chapter and a long-range record that is very slightly better than average. Once again the wind-up buys a fraction of a goal rather than a fistful, and this book has now printed that finding enough times to stop being surprised by it.

The fourteen shots from inside twenty feet returned five goals, which is the number the eye remembers and the sample nobody should build on.

140 goals and 431 assists in 952 career games. The passing is the career.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 215 pounds, with 16 penalty minutes in 73 games and 315 in 952 career games — an exceptionally low rate for a defenceman who has played twenty-four minutes a night for fifteen years.

3.32 miles a game at the 94th percentile, at a top speed of 21.5 mph, the 14th, with 0.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 6th.

That is the shape this book keeps finding on good defencemen and it is at its most extreme here: enormous mileage from a man in the bottom seventh of the league for top speed. He never goes fast and he never stops, at thirty-three.

He defends with his stick and his gap rather than by hitting, and 315 penalty minutes across fifteen seasons is what that method costs.

He is hard to beat one-on-one because he does not commit, which is the same reason he is rarely caught out of position and rarely in the penalty box.

The Intangibles

Fourth overall in 2008, fifteen seasons, 952 games, 571 points across St. Louis and Vegas, the captaincy in St. Louis, and two Stanley Cups — St. Louis in 2019 and here.

140 goals and 431 assists, and a plus-117.

He is thirty-three, on a long contract, playing the most minutes of any defenceman on a club that has just won.

A thousand-game top-pair defenceman with two Cups on two clubs is about as settled a file as this book contains. The one thing to watch is the top speed: the 14th percentile at thirty-three, on a long contract, is the number that decides how this ends.