Cal Foote

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

2 goals and 5 assists in 50 games — 7 points — listed with Tampa Bay and Nashville, at 15:07 a night. Plus-6, 39 shots, 63 penalty minutes.

Every minute of five-on-five ice this book has for him is Nashville’s, and there are 697 of them. 43.8 per cent of the expected goals, the 14th percentile and the worst of any man in this chapter.

His ice nonetheless finished 30-23 against an expectation of 24.01-30.78 — six goals better than the chances at the attacking end and eight better at the defensive. That is a fourteen-goal swing in his favour and almost all of it is Juuse Saros, who faced more shots than any goaltender in the league last season.

He started 40.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 14th percentile.

Three seasons, 141 games, 19 points.

The Finesse Game

39 shots at a median of 51 feet, 71 per cent of them from beyond forty, and two goals.

Beyond forty: 27 shots on goal, none. Twenty to forty: 10 shots, 1 goal.

100.7 mph at the 98th percentile of measured shot speed, on 14 slap shots out of 58 tracked attempts. That is a genuine reading rather than an artefact — a quarter of what he shoots is a slap shot and it is among the hardest in the league.

It has produced five goals in 141 games. A hard point shot with nothing in front of it is a rebound for the other team, and the file has yet to show what else is meant to come with it.

5 goals and 14 assists in three seasons. There is no first pass to build on either.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 224, and this is the file.

Top speed 20.2 mph. Of the 574 skaters in this book who played forty games, only Brayden McNabb measured slower. Bursts above twenty miles an hour: one, in fifty games — also the second-fewest in the league.

Those two readings agree with each other and with the 14th-percentile chance share, and together they are as clear a picture as this book’s tracking ever produces. He does not skate. A 6-5 defenceman who cannot recover has to be perfect positionally, and 43.8 per cent of the expected goals says he is not.

What he does have is the frame and 63 penalty minutes in fifty games. He is hard to get around in a small area and impossible to beat with contact.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2017, and 141 games and 19 points across six seasons since.

He has now been moved once and is on his third organisation in two years, which for a top-fifteen pick at twenty-four is the market’s verdict rather than a scout’s.

The honest projection is narrow. The size and the shot are real, the skating is at the floor of the league and does not improve after twenty-four, and everything else in the file depends on the second thing.