This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Ben Hutton
Vegas Golden Knights Defense
A career minus-75, and the 95th percentile of zone starts to keep it from getting worse.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16 | VAN | 75 | 1 | 24 | 25 | -21 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 104 | 1.0 | 19:52 |
| 2016-17 | VAN | 71 | 5 | 14 | 19 | -22 | 31 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 130 | 3.9 | 20:30 |
| 2017-18 | VAN | 61 | 0 | 6 | 6 | -9 | 23 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 103 | 0.0 | 18:25 |
| 2018-19 | VAN | 69 | 5 | 15 | 20 | -23 | 43 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 114 | 4.4 | 22:21 |
| 2019-20 | LAK | 65 | 4 | 12 | 16 | +5 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 114 | 3.5 | 18:16 |
| 2020-21 | ANA/TOR | 38 | 1 | 4 | 5 | -13 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 54 | 1.8 | 18:28 |
| 2021-22 | VGK | 58 | 3 | 10 | 13 | +7 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 78 | 3.9 | 15:28 |
| 2022-23 | VGK | 31 | 3 | 5 | 8 | +1 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 52 | 5.8 | 16:00 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 468 | 22 | 90 | 112 | -75 | 174 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 749 | 2.9 | 19:00 |
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
3 goals and 5 assists in 31 games — 8 points — at 16:00 a night. Plus-1, 52 shots at 5.8 per cent, 6 penalty minutes.
52.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 456 minutes, the 64th percentile, with his ice at 16-15 against an expectation of 18.20-16.58.
He started 62.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 95th percentile: 143 attacking draws against 85 defensive ones. That is the softest deployment of any defenceman on this roster by a wide margin, and it is what a seventh defenceman on a good club gets.
Four hundred and fifty-six minutes is a third of a season and a 64th-percentile share out of 95th-percentile starts is not a recommendation.
The Finesse Game
52 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 70 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.
Beyond forty feet: 31 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: 13 shots and two goals, 15.38 per cent. Inside twenty: six shots and one goal.
66 tracked attempts, nine of them slap shots, and a shot measured at 94.3 mph, the 74th percentile.
22 goals in 468 career games at 2.9 per cent — the fourth-lowest career shooting rate of the 101 defencemen in this book with more than four hundred games.
90 career assists against 22 goals. The puck-moving was the case for him coming out of Vancouver and eight seasons have not built much on it.
The Physical Game
6-3 and 209 pounds, with 6 penalty minutes in 31 games and 174 in 468 career games.
Top speed 21.9 mph at the 31st percentile, 0.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 14th, 2.20 miles a game at the 24th — which is sixteen minutes of ice time in a third of a season.
Slow, and not covering unusual ground when he plays.
He is not a physical defenceman and does not clear his crease, and at 6-3 that is a choice rather than a limitation.
He defends by keeping his gap and hoping the play goes wide, which works on a soft assignment and is the reason he gets one.
The Intangibles
A hundred and forty-seventh overall in 2012, the fifth round, eight seasons, 468 games, 112 points across Vancouver, Los Angeles, Anaheim and Vegas, and a Stanley Cup.
22 goals and 90 assists, and a minus-75 — the largest negative on this roster and one of the larger ones in this book.
He is thirty, a seventh defenceman who has played four hundred and sixty-eight NHL games, which is a longer career than most fifth-round picks manage.
The file is what it is. Four hundred games of below-average defending, a soft deployment when a good club is forced to use him, and a Stanley Cup ring for thirty-one games of it.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- he lacks itraised, and he does not have it
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
- sheltered· is started in the attacking end
63% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 96th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
“He is not a physical defenceman and does not clear his crease, and at 6-3 that is a choice rather than a limitation.”
“He defends by keeping his gap and hoping the play goes wide, which works on a soft assignment and is the reason he gets one.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 456 minutes
- Expected goals
- 52.3%
- 69th pct
- Shot attempts
- 49.5%
- 48th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 16 for, 15 against. Expected: 18.2 and 16.6.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 45 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.
Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 60 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 31 games
- Top speed
- 21.9 mph
- 62nd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.32 a game
- Distance
- 2.20 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 94.3 mph
- 66th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2022-23 · 456 minutes at five-on-five
- Brayden Pachal16%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2022-23
- The club
- VGK took 51.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 52.3% — 1.3 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- 456 minutes at five-on-five — 12th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nicolas Hague | 56.6% | 48.7% | 48.0% |
| William Karlsson | 52.2% | 52.4% | 54.4% |
| Jonathan Marchessault | 41.2% | 56.4% | 53.4% |
56.6% together, 48.7% for him apart and 48.0% for Hague apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
63 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 70% from beyond forty.