Colton Parayko

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

4 goals and 23 assists in 79 games — 27 points — at 23:00 a night. Minus-19, 133 shots at 3.0 per cent, 30 penalty minutes, no power-play points.

45.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,577 minutes, the 16th percentile, with his ice at 50-73 against an expectation of 55.92-67.99.

He started 38.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 10th percentile: 326 attacking draws against 521 defensive ones. That is the hardest deployment on this club, and 1,577 five-on-five minutes of it is the fifth-largest workload in this edition.

So the minus-19 needs the qualifier. A club that finished twenty-seventh in chance share sent this man out for the shift that started in its own end, five hundred and twenty-one times.

The Finesse Game

133 shots at a median of 49 feet, with 66 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 93 shots on goal and no goals at all. From twenty to forty: 25 shots and three goals, 12.00 per cent, above the league rate for defencemen of 8.83. Inside twenty: 13 shots and one goal.

Ninety-three shots on goal from the point and nothing. Against a league rate of 3.17 per cent that is about three goals of bad luck, and it is the largest volume in this book from a defenceman who scored none: Erik Gudbranson is next at 77.

And this is the strongest case yet against the mechanism this book once offered for the point shot. He slaps 71 of his 183 tracked attempts — 38.8 per cent, the highest share on this blue line and the eleventh-highest of the 153 defencemen in this book who took a hundred attempts — and his shot is measured at 99.0 mph, the 95th percentile. He is exactly the player the argument said should be rewarded from range.

He was not. Across the 109 defencemen who put sixty or more shots on goal from beyond forty feet the correlation between slap-shot share and long-range conversion is r = 0.291, and Parayko is the clearest illustration in the book of how much room that leaves: a 95th-percentile shot, the eleventh-highest slap share of the 153, the largest long-range volume of any defenceman who scored none from there, and zero goals.

The 23 assists are the offensive file. He moves the puck up the wall and does not join.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 228 pounds, and unusually mobile for it: 3.17 miles a game at the 89th percentile, a top speed of 22.8 mph at the 78th, and 1.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 69th.

That is a genuinely rare combination. Most 6-6 defencemen in this book sit in the bottom quarter of the speed measures; he is above average on all three.

He defends with reach before he defends with weight. The stick is enormous and it takes the pass away first; the body arrives only when the stick has not worked.

30 penalty minutes in 79 games and 167 in 577 career games — a very low rate for a man his size, and it is the direct consequence of the method above.

He blocks shots and eats minutes, and at twenty-three a night against the other club’s best line on a bad team, that is most of the job.

The Intangibles

Eighty-sixth overall in 2012, the third round, eight seasons, 577 games, 233 points, all of them here.

51 goals in eight years and a Stanley Cup in 2019. The offensive peak is 35 points, reached in 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2021-22, and the 27 last season is his lowest full-season total.

He is thirty, on a long contract, and the club around him has been taken apart: Ryan O’Reilly, Vladimir Tarasenko and Ivan Barbashev were all traded in February.

What the file describes is a first-pair defensive defenceman having a hard season in front of a chance share he did not create. The 16th-percentile chance share is real and so is the 10th-percentile deployment, and no measure in this book separates them.