Brian Dumoulin

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 24 assists in 82 games — 25 points — at 20:38 a night for Pittsburgh. Minus-4, 82 shots at 1.2 per cent, 16 penalty minutes, no power-play points.

25 points is a career high by two, in his tenth season.

50.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,424 minutes, the 51st percentile, with his ice at 52-70 against an expectation of 62.28-60.81 — ten goals short at the good end and nine over at the other, which on a club that finished last in the league in finishing is the ordinary experience and not his.

He started 49.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 45th percentile: 441 attacking draws against 442 defensive ones, which is as close to an exactly balanced deployment as this book records.

The Finesse Game

82 shots at a median of 50 feet, with 63 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 48 shots on goal and one goal — 2.08 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 21 shots and none. Inside twenty: 11 shots and none. Eighty shots on goal in a season and one of them went in.

A 1.2 per cent shooting percentage. Nineteen goals in 546 career games at 2.95 per cent, which is one of the lowest figures any defenceman in this book carries into a tenth season.

120 tracked attempts, only 16 of them slap shots — a 13.3 per cent share, low for a defenceman — and 74 wrist shots. 89.6 mph at the 41st percentile.

The shot is soft, it is rarely a slap, and it does not go in. None of that is a criticism: 24 assists from a defenceman who never joins the rush is the entire offensive contribution and it is the right one.

The first pass is the skill. He takes the puck off the wall under pressure and moves it before the forecheck arrives, which is a harder thing than it looks and is why he has played twenty minutes a night in seven of the last eight seasons.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 215 pounds. Top speed 21.9 mph at the 29th percentile, 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 19th, 2.78 miles a game at the 67th.

Slow, heavy and positionally sound, which is the same description he would have got at twenty-four.

16 penalty minutes in 82 games is a remarkably low figure for a defenceman playing twenty-one minutes, and 146 in 546 career games says the same thing across a decade: he is almost never beaten badly enough to have to foul.

He defends with reach and body position rather than by closing, and at 6-4 the stick takes away the lane before the contact is needed.

The Intangibles

Fifty-first overall in 2009, the second round, ten seasons, 546 games, 139 points, and two Stanley Cups in Pittsburgh.

19 goals in a decade. The career has been the same season nine times: twenty minutes a night, a plus record when the club is good, twenty points, and no attention.

He is thirty-two, joining a club that gave up chances at the third-lowest rate in the league and needed a left-handed defenceman who does not need the puck.

What this file is worth is exactly what it has always been worth: the second defenceman on a pair, doing the half of the job nobody writes down.