Cal Clutterbuck

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

6 goals and 6 assists in 49 games — 12 points — at 12:13 a night. Plus-9, 44 shots at 13.6 per cent, 30 penalty minutes.

44.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 16th percentile, with his ice at 18-12 against an expectation of 16.6-20.95 — nine goals better than the chances at the defensive end across 509 minutes.

He started 28.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone: 87 attacking draws against 223, the 2nd percentile of this book. Of the seven most defensively deployed skaters in the league, four are Islanders, and he is the most extreme of them.

Sixteen seasons, 982 games, 274 points, 666 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

44 shots at a median of 25 feet, and six goals.

Inside twenty: 15 shots on goal and 2 goals. Twenty to forty: 18 and 3. Beyond forty: 10 and 1. The whole season is forty-three shots on goal and there is no band worth separating out.

30 wrist shots and 13 snap out of 65 tracked attempts. 87.6 mph at the 27th percentile.

136 goals in 982 games at 13.6 per cent last season, on a rate that has been between eight and thirteen for a decade and a half. He is where he is because of what happens before the shot.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 215, with 30 penalty minutes in forty-nine games and 666 in his career.

Top speed 21.6 mph, the 18th percentile; 0.4 bursts a game, the 18th; 1.94 miles a game, the 14th.

Bottom fifth of the league in all three at thirty-five, which is what sixteen seasons of this game costs.

He forechecks by running into people and finishes every check that is available and several that are not. At 5-11 and 215 he is built low and arrives heavy, and the reason he has 982 games is that nobody has found a way to make it not hurt.

What has gone is the recovery. He is beaten to loose pucks now that he used to reach, and the 16th-percentile chance share is partly that.

The Intangibles

Seventy-second overall in 2006, six seasons in Minnesota and ten here, and 982 games at thirty-five.

The last five seasons read 73 games, 37, 50, 59 and 49. The body is running out.

What the club is keeping is the third of a line it has kept together for a decade, on the argument that the three of them together are worth more than the sum of what this book can measure about them. The measurements do not support it. Nothing in the measurements can rule it out either.