Alexandre Carrier

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

77 games, 3 goals and 27 assists at 20:59 a night, plus-26, fifty penalty minutes. One hundred and fifteenth overall in 2015, four seasons, 101 games, 33 points.

This was his first full season. He had played twenty-four NHL games across the previous three.

The Finesse Game

5-11 and 174 pounds is the 4th-lightest of the 223 defencemen in this edition, behind Jared Spurgeon, Samuel Girard and Alex Goligoski.

1.14 even-strength points per 60 is the 71st percentile and thirteen per cent of his points came on the power play, where he takes a minute a night.

3.53 shots per 60 is the 52nd-lowest of 202 and 87.0 mph is the 4th percentile for shot speed — he does not have one. What he does instead is go inside: twenty per cent of his shots came from the slot, the 94th percentile among defencemen, at a 46-foot median that is the 18th-shortest of the 202. For a man this size that is a deliberate and slightly alarming way to make a living.

48.1 per cent of the expected goals is the 36th percentile and 47.6 per cent of the attempts the 29th, on 45.4 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 190th-lowest of 652 skaters.

His ice went 54-32 against an expectation of 45.69-49.27. Seventeen fewer goals against than the model asked. The plus-26 is almost entirely that. Nashville’s goaltending rated 18th in the league overall, so this is not a club-wide crease effect spread evenly across the roster; what produced it on his ice specifically, the record cannot say.

The Physical Game

3.53 hits per 60 is the 43rd percentile and 4.61 blocks the 63rd at 174 pounds, which is more of both than the weight suggests.

0.71 penalties drawn per 60 is the 24th-most of 202 defencemen against 0.93 taken, and fifty penalty minutes came out of seventy-seven games at 174 pounds.

The Intangibles

2:52 short-handed a night is the 13th-most of the 202 defencemen who played forty games.

21.7 mph is the 71st of 192 defencemen from the bottom, 1.7 bursts per 60 the 140th, 8.66 miles per 60 the 138th. Slow by the chips, ordinary in ground covered, which is not what a 174-pound defenceman is supposed to read as.

He is 26 and has one full season. Twenty-seven assists, twenty-one minutes, the 13th-heaviest short-handed load of 202 defencemen and a chair on the hard side of the league are the case, and they are a good one. The plus-26 is not part of it: seventeen goals of it came from an on-ice goals-against that beat the model, and nothing in the file says a defenceman controls that.