Calen Addison

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

3 goals and 26 assists in 62 games — 29 points — and minus-17. 16:07 a night, 77 shots, 22 penalty minutes.

Twenty-six assists from a twenty-two-year-old defenceman is a genuine number. The minus-17 is the largest on the club by eight.

49.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 50th percentile — dead average — with his ice at 27-41 against an expectation of 29.62-29.83. Eleven goals worse at the defensive end than the chances deserved, on a club whose goaltending finished fourth in the league.

That is the interesting part. The chance share says average; the goals say disaster; and the goaltending was not the explanation. What is left is a defenceman whose mistakes happen close to the net.

Three seasons, 80 games, 33 points.

The Finesse Game

77 shots at a median of 54 feet, 4 per cent from inside twenty and 87 per cent from beyond forty — one of the two most perimeter shot distributions of any defenceman in these five chapters.

Beyond forty: 65 shots on goal, 3 goals, 4.62 per cent. Inside forty: 11 shots and no goals.

Eleven shots from inside forty feet across sixty-two games. He does not leave the blue line, and 48 of his 106 tracked attempts were slap shots — nearly half, in a league where the defencemen’s share has fallen to 24.17 per cent.

86.3 mph at the 18th percentile, on that slap-shot volume, which makes it one of the more meaningful readings in this chapter and not a flattering one: he takes the shot the measurement is built on and does not drive it.

The 26 assists come from the first pass and the power play, not from the shot.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 173, and 22 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.9 mph, the 82nd percentile; bursts 0.6 a game, the 30th; 2.28 miles a game, the 31st.

He skates well and does not defend. At 173 pounds he cannot win a battle in front of his own net and he does not take the body anywhere else on the ice, and the eleven-goal gap between his expected and actual goals against is the shape that leaves.

Minnesota dresses three of the five lightest defencemen in the league and he is one of them.

The Intangibles

Fifty-third overall in 2018 to Pittsburgh, traded to Minnesota at nineteen in the Jason Zucker deal, and eighty NHL games since.

59.2 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 88th percentile — the most favourable deployment on the blue line, which makes the 50th-percentile chance share worse rather than better.

He is twenty-three, he can move a puck, and the defensive record is the worst on the club. That is a familiar profile and the resolution of it is usually decided by the coach rather than by the player.