Ben Hutton

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

58 games, 3 goals and 10 assists at 15:28 a night, plus-7, thirty-two penalty minutes, 78 shots. Hundred-and-forty-seventh overall in 2012 by Vancouver — the fifth round — seven seasons, 437 games, 104 points.

The Finesse Game

A 54-foot median shot is the 90th percentile among the 202 defencemen who played forty games, with four per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet and seventy-seven per cent from beyond forty. He shoots from the blue line and nowhere else.

Three goals from seventy-eight shots is 3.8 per cent, and 5.22 shots per 60 is the 71st percentile.

0.91 even-strength points per 60 is the 47th percentile and none of his thirteen points came on the power play, off effectively no power-play time at all — 0.02 minutes a night, the 7th percentile.

52.0 per cent of the expected goals is the 69th percentile and 51.4 per cent of the attempts the 66th, out of 54.3 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 200th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.

His ice went 37-32 against an expectation of 36.26-33.49 — a goal ahead in front and a goal and a half fewer against, which is a third pair doing its job.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 209 pounds, and thirty-two penalty minutes in fifty-eight games — 168 across 437 career games.

4.82 blocks per 60 is the 70th percentile and 3.28 hits the 39th, against 0:43 a night short-handed at the 20th.

0.54 penalties drawn per 60 against 0.67 taken, both ordinary.

The Intangibles

22.3 mph is the 65th percentile among the 192 tracked defencemen, 1.5 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 the 49th and 8.50 miles per 60 the 54th. Ordinary in all three, which is the most accurate summary of the file.

He is 29, a fifth-round pick, with 104 points in 437 games. The number that follows him is a career plus-minus of minus-76, and it is worth being fair about where it came from: four Vancouver seasons on clubs that finished nowhere accounted for seventy-five of it. A plus-7 on the third pair in Vegas is the first season of his career the goal column has not been an argument against him.

Fifteen and a half minutes a night is the 10th percentile. That is the job, and there is nothing in the tracking or the shot chart to suggest a bigger one.