Brandon Montour

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

16 goals and 57 assists in 80 games — 73 points, fifth among defencemen in the league — with 107 penalty minutes, eighth in the league among all skaters. Plus-9, 24:08 a night, 242 shots, five game-winners.

He is the only defenceman in the league with seventy points and a hundred penalty minutes. Dahlin is the only other man near it at 73 and 92.

His career best before this was 37 points. Then 73.

52.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 69th percentile, with his ice at 83-61 against an expectation of 71.70-65.35 — eleven goals better at the offensive end than the chances, four better at the defensive.

Seven seasons, 454 games, 219 points.

The Finesse Game

242 shots at a median of 49 feet, but 13 per cent of them from inside twenty — the highest close-range share of any Florida defenceman, and the mechanism behind the point total.

Beyond forty: 145 shots on goal, 4 goals, 2.76 per cent. Inside forty: 91 shots, 12 goals, 13.19 per cent.

That split is the whole report. Three-quarters of his shots came from range and produced four goals; the quarter he took from inside produced twelve. A defenceman who joins the rush and arrives at the far post is doing something structurally different from one who shoots from the blue line, and the conversion rates say so.

97.9 mph at the 91st percentile on sixty-eight slap shots — heavy, and less relevant than usual, because the goals do not come from there.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 199, and 107 penalty minutes, more than double his previous career high in a Florida shirt.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 67th percentile; bursts 1.6 a game, the 75th; 3.54 miles a game, the 98th percentile, the highest figure on the club at any position.

He plays angry. The penalty total is not one bad month; his previous career high was 56, and 107 in eighty games is close to a minor and a half a night. Some of what he adds on the scoresheet he gives back in the box.

The Intangibles

Fifty-fifth overall in 2014, from the Six Nations of the Grand River, and one of the few Indigenous defencemen this league has had at the top of a blue line.

52.9 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 62nd percentile.

The honest question about a 37-to-73 jump is whether it repeats. He was twenty-nine, on the first power-play unit of a club that ranked fourth in expected goals with the man advantage, and 57 assists on a team that scored 290 goals is a figure that moves with the room. This book would price in a fall and not a collapse.