Cale Makar

Last Season

Twenty goals and 59 assists in 75 games for 79 points, plus-32, on 24:51 a night. Twenty 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. Fifty-nine 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

Six 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 twenty-three, 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 eighty-two-game season in some time, and a club whose defence is organised around one man feels every game he misses.