Artem Zub

Last Season

Five goals and 25 assists in 81 games — 30 points, plus-22, at 20:48 a night with 1,402 five-on-five minutes, the most on the club.

The Finesse Game

Almost none. A hundred and forty-eight unblocked attempts from a median of 58 feet, three per cent from inside twenty, five goals.

Twenty-five assists from twenty-one minutes a night is a fair return for a defenceman whose job is to give the puck to somebody better and then defend the consequences.

The Physical Game

Six foot three, 201, and genuinely hard. Fifty-seven penalty minutes, a willingness to hit and to block shots, and he clears his own crease properly.

The Intangibles

Fifty-two point seven per cent of the expected goals, 76th percentile, and 51.4 per cent of the shot attempts, 70th, across fourteen hundred minutes of the hardest assignment on a club that finished first in the league in even-strength expected goals against.

The goals went 63-49 in his favour — the best margin on the roster — and the plus-22 agrees with it, which on this team is rare.

He is 30, undrafted out of Russia, and arrived in the NHL at 25. Six years later he plays the most minutes on the best defensive team in hockey. That is one of the better scouting stories in this book.