Cam Fowler

Last Season

Four goals and 26 assists in all 82 games — 30 points, minus-11, at 21:05 a night with only fourteen penalty minutes. His 1,124th career game and his 523rd point.

The Finesse Game

The first pass has always been the tool and it still is. A hundred and nineteen unblocked attempts from a median of 50 feet, four per cent from inside twenty, four goals — the shot was never a weapon and is less of one now.

Four hundred and fourteen career assists against 109 goals.

Twenty-six assists in a full season at 34 is a fair return and the reason a sixteen-year veteran is still playing twenty-one minutes.

The Physical Game

Six foot two, 213, and one of the least physical defencemen in the league. Fourteen penalty minutes across 82 games is among the lowest rates in this edition.

He does not clear a crease and does not finish checks. The skating is still good enough to defend the rush and it has always been how he plays.

The Intangibles

Forty-nine point six per cent of the expected goals, 49th percentile, and 49 per cent of the shot attempts, 45th, across 1,469 minutes — the second-heaviest workload on the club, with the goals 64-62 in his favour.

Dead average across a very large sample is a genuinely useful thing at 34.

Seven points in his last ten, three of them goals. He is 34, won a Cup in Anaheim, and is the oldest player on a roster whose best forwards are 22, 24 and 27. That gap is the whole shape of this club.