This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Brenden Dillon

82 games at 34, 67 penalty minutes, and 81 per cent of his shots from beyond 40 feet.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2011-12	DAL	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	6	0.0	19:59
2012-13	DAL	48	3	5	8	+1	65	0	0	1	75	4.0	21:23
2013-14	DAL	80	6	11	17	+9	86	0	2	1	97	6.2	21:06
2014-15	DAL/SJS	80	2	8	10	-13	77	0	1	1	91	2.2	19:34
2015-16	SJS	76	2	9	11	+8	61	0	0	1	93	2.1	16:41
2016-17	SJS	81	2	8	10	-2	60	0	0	0	86	2.3	16:28
2017-18	SJS	81	5	17	22	-7	60	0	0	0	88	5.7	17:19
2018-19	SJS	82	1	21	22	+19	61	0	1	0	71	1.4	17:45
2019-20	SJS/WSH	69	1	13	14	-2	104	0	0	0	58	1.7	19:28
2020-21	WSH	56	2	17	19	+15	49	0	0	0	51	3.9	18:57
2021-22	WPG	79	3	17	20	+16	67	0	0	0	85	3.5	18:50
2022-23	WPG	82	2	21	23	+2	76	0	0	0	83	2.4	19:35
2023-24	WPG	77	8	12	20	+20	92	0	0	2	79	10.1	18:44
2024-25	NJD	82	2	14	16	+8	67	0	0	0	48	4.2	18:35
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	974	39	173	212	+74	925	0	4	6	1011	3.9	18:43

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

2 goals and 14 assists in 82 games for 16 points, plus-8, on 18:35 a night with 67 penalty minutes.

49.7 per cent at five-on-five, the 49th percentile, over 1,221 minutes. 81 per cent of his shots came from beyond 40 feet — 48 attempts in a full season, which is the lowest shot volume of any full-time defenceman in this edition.

The Finesse Game

None. 48 shots in 82 games and 2 goals, and 14 assists — the puck game is limited to getting it to a forward without incident.

There is no offensive projection and there never was.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 225, and among the more feared defencemen in the league to meet in a corner. He hits hard, clears his crease, and will fight anybody.

67 penalty minutes over 82 games is a high total. 82 games at 34 playing this way is the impressive part — he has cleared 75 games in eleven of fourteen seasons.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, six organisations, and a career of being the heavy defenceman every contender adds.

At 35 the projection is 70 games of third-pair hockey. On a blue line with two young puck-movers and three injury-prone shutdown men, the availability is worth more than the play.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
wins-the-walla strength· the corners and below the goal line
“6-4 and 225, and among the more feared defencemen in the league to meet in a corner.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He hits hard, clears his crease, and will fight anybody.”
clears-the-creasea strength· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He hits hard, clears his crease, and will fight anybody.”
nastya strength· hard to play against; the edge is the point
“He hits hard, clears his crease, and will fight anybody.”
undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, six organisations, and a career of being the heavy defenceman every contender adds.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 1,221 minutes

Expected goals: 49.7%; 49th pct
Shot attempts: 50.3%; 56th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 55 for, 56 against. Expected: 50.0 and 50.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

21st

Numbers

49th

The numbers rank him 28 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

Both bars are percentiles among the 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 67 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2024-25 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.2 mph; 71st pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.48 a game
Distance: 2.55 miles a game
Hardest shot: 91.4 mph; 57th pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 1221 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2024-25

The club: NJD took 50.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.7% — 1.0 below the club he did it on.
The role: Third pair, 1,221 minutes at five-on-five — 86th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Dougie Hamilton	51.9%	45.6%	48.9%
Jesper Bratt	49.5%	49.8%	53.9%
Jack Hughes	54.0%	47.7%	58.5%

51.9% together, 45.6% for him apart and 48.9% for Hamilton apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

96 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 69 feet. 7% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 81% from beyond forty.