Alexander Romanov

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

2 goals and 20 assists in 76 games — 22 points — at 19:27 a night. Plus-13, 100 shots at 2.0 per cent, 43 penalty minutes, across 1,309 five-on-five minutes.

46.2 per cent of the expected goals, the 28th percentile, with his ice at 53-46 against an expectation of 51.09-59.51 — thirteen and a half goals better than the chances at the defensive end. On this club that sentence has one explanation and it is standing in the crease behind him.

He started 45 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 28th percentile.

Three seasons, 209 games, 41 points, the first two of them in Montreal.

The Finesse Game

100 shots at a median of 55 feet, 83 per cent of them from beyond forty, and two goals in seventy-six games.

Beyond forty: 81 shots on goal and 2 goals, 2.47 per cent, below the positional rate of 3.17. Inside twenty: five shots all season, none of them goals.

A 2.0 per cent shooting percentage across a hundred shots is close to the floor of what a defenceman who shoots at all can post, and there is no version of this file where the shot becomes an asset.

86 wrist shots and 25 slap out of 134 tracked attempts. 95.6 mph at the 82nd percentile, which on twenty-five slap shots is a real reading and has produced six goals in three seasons.

35 career assists against 6 goals. He moves the puck to the nearest available option and does not hold it, which given the skating is the correct decision every time.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 220, with 43 penalty minutes.

Top speed 21.3 mph, the 8th percentile. 0.4 bursts a game, the 21st; 2.69 miles a game, the 60th.

Bottom tenth of the league in outright speed, in nineteen minutes a night. That is the number the whole file turns on, and it is the reason a 46.2 per cent chance share came out of near-neutral deployment.

What he has instead is 220 pounds and the willingness to use every one of them. He steps up on the puck carrier, finishes his checks hard, and is genuinely difficult to get around in a confined space.

And the risk that comes with it: a defenceman this slow who steps up is beaten wide the moment he guesses, and there is nothing behind him when it happens.

The Intangibles

Thirty-eighth overall in 2018 to Montreal, two seasons there, and a trade at twenty-two.

209 games by twenty-three, and a career line of 6 goals and 35 assists that says exactly what kind of defenceman this is going to be.

He is twenty-three, which is the only reason to be optimistic. The physical game is already at its ceiling and the skating is at the floor of the league; whether he becomes a genuine second-pair defenceman depends on the one thing in the file that does not usually improve.