Brayden McNabb

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

1 goal and 16 assists in 82 games — 17 points — at 19:51 a night. Plus-17, 89 shots at 1.1 per cent, 51 penalty minutes.

52.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,428 minutes — the most of any player on this roster — with his ice at 60-54 against an expectation of 60.13-54.64. The goals matched the chances almost exactly at both ends, which is rarer than it sounds.

He started 44.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 27th percentile: 388 attacking draws against 482 defensive ones. Eighty-two games, the hardest starts on the club, the most five-on-five ice on it, and a chance share above even.

The Finesse Game

89 shots at a median of 54 feet, with 70 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 59 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: 21 shots and none. Inside twenty: six shots and one goal.

One goal in eighty-two games, and it came from inside twenty feet. Eighty of his eighty-six shots on goal came from outside it and none of them went in.

130 tracked attempts, 33 of them slap shots — a 25.4 per cent share — and a shot measured at 97.2 mph, the 89th percentile.

24 goals in 658 career games at 3.4 per cent. There is no offence in this file at all and there is not supposed to be.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 215 pounds, with 51 penalty minutes in 82 games and 472 in 658 career games.

A top speed of 19.7 mph — the 0th percentile, and the slowest maximum of any skater in this edition — and zero bursts above twenty miles an hour across eighty-two games. Not a low number. Zero. He is the only skater in this book who did not reach twenty miles an hour once.

He covers 2.63 miles a game, the 55th percentile, which is the strange part: the slowest man in the league covers a perfectly ordinary amount of ground, because he never stops and he never accelerates.

He is punishing, he finishes every check, and he is very hard to move off the front of his own net. At 6-4 and 215 pounds that is the entire method, and 472 penalty minutes are what it costs.

He blocks shots, and a defenceman who cannot skate out of trouble learns to get in front of it instead.

And this is the file that ought to unsettle a reader. A 27th-percentile deployment, the most five-on-five minutes on a Stanley Cup winner, and a chance share above even — from a man who is measurably the slowest skater in this book. Whatever it is that makes that work, no measurement in this project can see it.

The Intangibles

Sixty-sixth overall in 2009, the third round, eleven seasons, 658 games, 133 points across Buffalo, Los Angeles and Vegas, and a Stanley Cup.

24 goals and 109 assists, and a plus-98.

He is thirty-two, and he has played six of his eleven seasons here.

A plus-98 across eleven seasons from a defenceman with 133 points is the whole argument. He is not fast, he does not shoot, he does not pass, and the goals go in at the other end. The book has no column for whatever that is.