Cale Makar

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

17 goals and 49 assists in 60 games, plus-16, 26:23 a night — the heaviest workload on the club and 66 points at a rate of 1.10 a game, which is where he was the year he won the Norris and the Conn Smythe (86 in 77, or 1.12).

The rate did not move. The availability did: he missed 22 games, and Colorado played a quarter of the season without the best defenceman they have ever had.

57.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 94th percentile, and his ice went 55-38 against an expectation of 53.53-39.60 — a defenceman whose results and whose chances agree almost exactly, which is rarer than it sounds and is the cleanest thing on this page.

The Finesse Game

176 shots at a median of 45 feet, 64 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 9 per cent from inside twenty. That reads like a point shooter, and the yield says he is a different animal.

From beyond forty feet he put 104 shots on goal and scored seven — 6.73 per cent, against a league rate of 3.17 per cent for a defenceman. More than double, on volume nobody exceeds. Devon Toews, his partner, took 109 from the same places on the same power play and scored twice.

Inside forty he added ten on 72. The 49 assists are the larger part of the game and always have been: 181 in 238 career games, which is 0.76 assists a game across four seasons.

His shot measures 100.7 mph, the 98th percentile — a figure to hold lightly, since the tracked maximum is largely a record of whether a man winds up, and 28 of his attempts were slap shots.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 187, and the skating is the whole story. 3.60 miles a game, eighth-most of any skater in the league, at a top speed of 23.4 mph in the 96th percentile.

That combination is what separates him. Fifty-nine defencemen covered three miles a game last season and twenty-four of them never broke 22 mph — heavy mileage at moderate speed is the ordinary shape of a first-pair defenceman. Makar is third-fastest in that whole group, behind Hanifin and his own teammate Byram. He is not merely always moving; he is always moving quickly.

30 penalty minutes in 60 games at 26 minutes a night. He is not physical and does not need to be: the puck is gone before the check arrives, which is a defensive method and not an absence of one.

The Intangibles

Fourth overall in 2017, out of the University of Massachusetts, and a Norris and a Conn Smythe already at 24.

Colorado were the defending champions and lost a seven-game first round to Seattle. The club’s process was intact all year — eighth in attempts, tenth in chances, sixth in expected goals against — and the result matched it. That is the frame this book keeps testing, and Colorado is the control case: the process and the record agreed.

The question the numbers raise is not about the play. It is the 60 games.