Photo by Lisa Gansky from New York, NY, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Brenden Dillon
New Jersey Devils Defense #5
A thousand and fifty-six games, undrafted, and a median shot from fifty-eight feet.
| Season | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-26 | 82 | 3 | 12 | 15 | -13 | 89 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 55 | 5.5 | 18:00 |
| Career | 1056 | 42 | 185 | 227 | +61 | 1014 | 0 | 4 | 8 | 1066 | 3.9 | 18:39 |
Last Season
Three goals and 12 assists in all 82 games — 15 points, minus-13, at 18:00 a night with 89 penalty minutes.
The Finesse Game
Absent by design. Eighty-three unblocked attempts from a median of 58 feet — among the longest in this edition — with two per cent from inside twenty, and three goals.
Forty-two goals in 1,056 career games. He is on the ice to defend and to hurt people, and the club has never pretended otherwise.
The Physical Game
Six foot four, 225, and undrafted — a career built entirely on being willing. Eighty-nine penalty minutes, the most of any Devil, a genuine appetite for fighting, and a cleared crease.
The skating went years ago and it is why the ice time has fallen to eighteen minutes.
The Intangibles
Fifty-one per cent of the expected goals, 62nd percentile, with the chances 52.3 to 50.1 in his favour and the goals 47-52 against.
That is a perfectly respectable season and the minus-13 is the club’s finishing rather than his defending.
He is 35, in his fifteenth season, and 1,056 games into a career that began with nobody drafting him. New Jersey is built around Hughes, Hughes, Bratt and Hischier — four men who weigh about seven hundred pounds between them. This is who the club keeps for the nights that turn nasty.