Conor Timmins

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

2 goals and 12 assists in 27 games — 14 points — at 15:06 a night between Arizona and Toronto. Minus-1, 19 shots at 10.5 per cent, 8 penalty minutes.

Fourteen points in twenty-seven games is 0.52 a game, which over a full season is a forty-point defenceman.

55.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 377 minutes, the 89th percentile, with his ice at 19-19 against an expectation of 15.78-12.43. A 54.2 per cent share of the attempts and a goal record that came out even anyway — three more went in for him and six and a half more against him than the chances called for, across 377 minutes, which is a sample small enough that it means very little.

He started 58.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 86th percentile. Soft minutes, in short bursts, on the third pair.

The Finesse Game

19 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 81 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 15 shots on goal and two goals — 13.33 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Fifteen shots. That is a fact about fifteen shots and nothing else, and this book will not build a sentence on it.

27 tracked attempts across 27 games, 11 of them slap shots, and a shot measured at 94.6 mph, the 76th percentile.

The 12 assists in 27 games are the actual reason he is on this roster. He is a genuine puck-mover: he sees the second option and passes to it, and the point production has followed him at every level.

21 points in 66 career games is a rate that would make him a top-four defenceman if any of it were durable.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 213 pounds, with 8 penalty minutes in 27 games and 16 in 66 career games.

A top speed of 20.5 mph, the 1st percentile — the sixth-slowest maximum of any skater in this book. 0.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 4th percentile, and 2.18 miles a game at the 24th.

That number needs a caution attached. A top speed is a maximum, and a maximum grows with the number of shifts a man takes, so twenty-seven games at fifteen minutes understates it against a defenceman who played eighty. It does not understate it by twenty percentiles, though, and the burst count says the same thing from a different direction.

So the skating is the problem, and it always has been. He is not physical either, and neither the feet nor the frame is what he is for.

The health record is the file. Sixty-six games in four NHL seasons, from a second-round pick who was drafted in 2017.

The Intangibles

Thirty-second overall in 2017, the second round, four seasons, 66 games, 21 points across Colorado, Arizona and Toronto.

Two goals and 19 assists, and a plus-1.

He is twenty-five, right-handed, and has played sixty-six NHL games in six years since the draft.

What the file describes is a defenceman whose passing would earn him a job and whose feet and durability may not let him keep one. The 0.52 points a game is real; so is the fact that it has never lasted more than a few weeks at a time.