Braden Schneider

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

5 goals and 13 assists in 81 games — 18 points — at 15:43 a night. Plus-9, 79 shots, 16 penalty minutes.

43 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 11th percentile — the worst of any Ranger — across 1,199 minutes. His ice finished 49-40 against an expectation of 40.54-53.83, which is eight goals better than the chances at the attacking end and fourteen better at the defensive.

Fourteen goals is a very large surplus and there is one man in the building it belongs to.

He started 50.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 50th percentile — dead-neutral deployment, and a chance share in the bottom eighth of the league out of it. That is the report.

Two seasons, 124 games, 29 points.

The Finesse Game

79 shots at a median of 50 feet, 70 per cent of them from beyond forty, and five goals.

Beyond forty feet: 55 shots on goal and 5 goals — 9.09 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17.

That is nearly three times the positional rate and it belongs in this chapter beside Trouba’s 1.33 for a specific reason. Schneider took 12 slap shots out of 103 tracked attempts, an eleven per cent share; Trouba slapped 31 per cent. The man who almost never winds up converted from range at seven times the rate of the man who does.

On fifty-five shots that proves nothing about either of them, and that is the point: the league-wide relationship between slap share and long-range conversion is real and weak, and at the level of one defenceman’s season it is swamped entirely.

62 wrist shots and 24 snap out of 103 attempts. 94.0 mph at the 71st percentile.

22 career assists in 124 games. There is no first-pass evidence yet in either direction.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 206, with sixteen penalty minutes in eighty-one games.

Top speed 22.5 mph, the 61st percentile; 0.7 bursts a game, the 37th; 2.14 miles a game, the 22nd.

Low mileage, which is fifteen minutes a night, and unremarkable speed. Nothing in the tracking explains the chance share and nothing in it rules the file out either.

He finishes checks and defends the front of the net without taking penalties, which at twenty-two is the useful half.

What the 11th-percentile share says is that the reads are not there yet. A defenceman who is neither slow nor out of position but is on the ice for the wrong events is usually making the wrong decision, and this book cannot see decisions.

The Intangibles

Nineteenth overall in 2020, and 124 games by twenty-two.

He has played 43 and 81 games in two seasons and the club has moved him steadily up the depth chart while the underlying numbers went the other way.

The honest projection is that this is a third-pair defenceman being developed in a role that is exposing him, on a club whose goaltender has covered fourteen goals of it. Either the reads improve or the record catches up.