Photo by Quintin Soloviev, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Cale Makar
Colorado Avalanche Defense #8
The best defenceman in the world, and the argument that skating is a more valuable thing to be built out of than size.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | COL | 57 | 12 | 38 | 50 | +12 | 12 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 121 | 9.9 | 21:01 |
| 2020-21 | COL | 44 | 8 | 36 | 44 | +17 | 12 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 104 | 7.7 | 24:19 |
| 2021-22 | COL | 77 | 28 | 58 | 86 | +48 | 26 | 9 | 0 | 6 | 240 | 11.7 | 25:40 |
| 2022-23 | COL | 60 | 17 | 49 | 66 | +16 | 30 | 5 | 0 | 6 | 176 | 9.7 | 26:23 |
| 2023-24 | COL | 77 | 21 | 69 | 90 | +15 | 16 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 231 | 9.1 | 24:46 |
| 2024-25 | COL | 80 | 30 | 62 | 92 | +28 | 14 | 12 | 2 | 4 | 246 | 12.2 | 25:43 |
| 2025-26 | COL | 75 | 20 | 59 | 79 | +32 | 24 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 199 | 10.1 | 24:51 |
| 2026-27 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 470 | 136 | 371 | 507 | +168 | 134 | 45 | 3 | 28 | 1317 | 10.3 | 24:48 |
This Season So Far
The 2026-27 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
20 goals and 59 assists in 75 games for 79 points, plus-32, on 24:51 a night. 20 goals from a defenceman is a season most never have; he has now done it more than once.
The Finesse Game
The skating is the whole player and it is the best in the league at his position. He accelerates out of his own zone with the puck and is simply gone — not fast in a straight line so much as instantly at top speed, with edges that let him change direction without losing any of it. Forecheckers do not pin him because they cannot get close enough to.
What separates him from the other elite skating defencemen is the decision at the end of the rush. He does not carry into trouble; he carries until a lane appears and then either shoots — the release is quick and heavier than it looks — or slides the puck to a man arriving late. 59 assists is not a power-play artefact.
Defensively he ends more plays with his feet than his stick, closing gaps so tightly that attackers run out of room at the blue line.
The Physical Game
6 feet and 187, which is average, and he is not a physical defenceman. He will not clear a crease by force and does not try to. What he has instead of size is the ability to remove the situation entirely — he retrieves pucks before pressure arrives because he gets there first.
That is the difference between him and the smaller defencemen he gets compared to: he is not undersized, he is ordinary-sized and built entirely out of skating.
The Intangibles
A Norris, a Conn Smythe and a Cup by 23, and the rare superstar about whom there is no character conversation at all.
The only real question left is durability — he has not played a full 82-game season in some time, and a club whose defence is organised around 1 man feels every game he misses.
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
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.
- sheltered· is started in the attacking end
62% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 97th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,328 minutes
- Expected goals
- 56%
- 92nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 54.7%
- 90th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 75 for, 42 against. Expected: 68.5 and 53.9.
The eye and the numbers
SightedThe two rank him within 7 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.
Both bars are percentiles among the 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 87 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, 2025-26 · 75 games
- Top speed
- 23.7 mph
- 99th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.97 a game
- Distance
- 3.64 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 98.2 mph
- 91st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 88.9
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.
Recent form
Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first
13
points in his last 10 games — 1 goals, 12 assists, 31 shots
Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.
Usual linemates
2025-26 · 1328 minutes at five-on-five
- Devon Toews58%
- Sam Malinski16%
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, 2025-26
- The club
- COL took 56.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.0% — 0.9 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- First pair, 1,328 minutes at five-on-five — 89th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nathan MacKinnon | 57.9% | 52.5% | 60.5% |
| Devon Toews | 57.2% | 54.0% | 62.7% |
| Martin Necas | 56.0% | 55.9% | 58.3% |
57.9% together, 52.5% for him apart and 60.5% for MacKinnon apart. He was worse away from MacKinnon, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than MacKinnon did.
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
326 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 20 of them goals. His median goal came from 34 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 63% from beyond forty.