Colin White

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

8 goals and 7 assists in 68 games — 15 points — at 9:38 a night for Florida. Even, 64 shots at 12.5 per cent, 12 penalty minutes.

9:38 a night is the lowest ice time of any forward in this chapter and the lowest of his seven seasons.

47.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 614 minutes, the 27th percentile, with his ice at 24-24 against an expectation of 20.79-23.06 — three goals better than the chances at the good end.

He started 52.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 59th percentile.

The Finesse Game

64 shots at a median of 23 feet.

Inside twenty feet: 25 shots on goal and seven goals — 28.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 22 shots and one goal. Beyond forty: 13 shots and none.

Seven goals from twenty-five shots is a rate that will not repeat and is worth roughly three goals of froth against the league rate. On sixty-four shots in a season, three goals is most of the difference between a fourth-line forward who scored eight and one who scored five.

89 tracked attempts, two of them slap shots, and 14 backhands. 80.8 mph at the 3rd percentile — one of the softest measured shots in this book.

The hands are real and the release is not. He is a passer at the goal line who scores when the puck arrives at his stick in the crease.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 195 pounds. 1.57 miles a game, the 1st percentile of the league and the eighth-lowest of the 575 skaters in this edition with forty games, at a top speed of 22.1 mph at the 39th and 1.0 bursts above twenty a game at the 52nd.

That is the tracking line of a man playing nine minutes a night, and it should be read as ice time before it is read as anything else. The speed numbers are ordinary; the ground covered is not, because there was no ground to cover.

12 penalty minutes in 68 games and 103 in 292 for a career. He is not a physical player and the fourth-line job he now holds is one that usually requires it.

The Intangibles

Twenty-first overall in 2015, seven seasons, 292 games, 113 points, six of them in Ottawa.

The 41 points he scored in 2018-19 at twenty-one is the season the rest of the career has been measured against, and nothing since has come close: 23, 18, 10 and 15 in the four years after it.

He is twenty-six, on a one-year look with a club that needed bodies behind three thirty-six-year-olds. A minus-52 for a career is mostly Ottawa and should be discounted accordingly.

What the file says plainly is that a first-round pick who is now playing under ten minutes a night at twenty-six has one more chance and knows it.