Cam York

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

30 games, 3 goals and 7 assists at 19:05 a night, minus-14, six penalty minutes, 33 shots. Fourteenth overall in 2019, and thirty-three NHL games across three calendar years.

Four hundred and sixty-one minutes of five-on-five ice is short of the five hundred this book requires before it will place a man in the league distribution, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Finesse Game

Nineteen minutes a night at twenty-one, on a club that finished 29th in the standings. That is the whole reason to pay attention.

Thirty-three shots from a 53-foot median with two per cent of them inside twenty feet. He plays the point and stays there, which is what a first-year defenceman is told to do.

48.6 per cent of the expected goals across 461 five-on-five minutes, the best share of any defenceman on the roster — and the smallest sample any of them is drawn from. His attempt share is 47.1. His on-ice goals went 18-25 against an expectation of 19.31-20.39 — five goals worse than the model asked at the wrong end, on a sample this small.

And the pairing number is the interesting one. Across the 348 five-on-five attempts he shared with Ivan Provorov the pair took 49.7 per cent of the expected goals; Provorov apart from him took 46.6 per cent across 2,437. Justin Braun, the only other defenceman the pair file records beside Provorov and his partner across four times as many attempts, came out at 44.4.

Three hundred and forty-eight attempts is a fortnight, not a finding. It is worth writing down and worth nothing more than that until there is a season of it.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 194 pounds, and the file is empty here. Thirty games at nineteen minutes produced almost no hitting and six penalty minutes.

The Intangibles

21.0 mph top speed and 0.2 bursts over twenty miles an hour a game. Both are drawn from thirty games and neither is comparable to a full season; a maximum scales with the number of shifts a man takes, and he took the fewest of any regular.

2.73 miles a game is the 60th percentile of the 568 skaters the tracking covers with forty games — the one measurement here that is not obviously a small-sample artefact, and it says he moves.

He is 21, a first-round pick, and the club he is on has just lost Claude Giroux and finished 31st in scoring. There is not enough here to grade him and there is enough to say the ice time was real, which at this stage of a rebuild is the only thing the book can honestly report.