Brandon Montour

Last Season

Eleven goals and 21 assists in 64 games — 32 points, minus-21, at 22:34 a night with 45 penalty minutes. Eighteen games missed.

The Finesse Game

The skating is genuinely excellent — he activates off the blue line as well as any defenceman in the league and he is difficult to forecheck.

The shot is volume from distance: 253 unblocked attempts, median 49 feet, 68 per cent from beyond forty, eleven goals. Three hundred and twenty-five points in 665 career games.

Twenty-one assists in 64 games is a fair return and rather less than he was signed to produce.

The Physical Game

Six foot even, 199, and light for the ice he takes. Forty-five penalty minutes.

He defends by skating rather than by stopping people, and against a heavy forecheck in his own end that runs out of answers.

The Intangibles

Forty-eight per cent of the expected goals, 36th percentile, and 48.2 per cent of the shot attempts, 37th, across 1,234 minutes.

Those are the best chance-share figures among Seattle’s four busiest defencemen, and the minus-21 sits on top of them — the goals went 31-41 against an expected 48.0 to 51.9.

That gap is Seattle’s problem in one line: the club finished 153 goals scored against an expected 150.4, so it is not that they missed their chances. It is that they never had enough of them.

One point in his last ten. He is 32, won a Cup in Florida, and is being paid to be the offensive engine of a blue line that spends its evenings in its own zone.