Dakota Joshua

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

11 goals and 12 assists in 79 games — 23 points — at 11:31 a night. Minus-16, 71 shots at 14.6 per cent, one on the power play, one shorthanded, 60 penalty minutes.

11 goals and 23 points are both career highs, in his third season.

46.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 825 minutes, the 25th percentile, with his ice at 25-38 against an expectation of 30.25-34.29 — five fewer goals scored than the chances called for and four more allowed.

He started 40.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 14th percentile: 184 attacking draws against 267 defensive ones. Fourth-line minutes, taking the defensive half of them, on a club that finished twenty-fourth in chance share.

The Finesse Game

71 shots at a median of 12 feet — the shortest of the 599 skaters in this book who took fifty or more tracked attempts — with 66 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty and 9 per cent from beyond forty.

Inside twenty feet: 50 shots on goal and 11 goals — 22.00 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 15 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: five shots and none.

Every goal he scored came from inside twenty feet, and fifty of his seventy-one shots came from there.

90 tracked attempts in 79 games, 52 of them wrist shots, 17 backhands — an 18.9 per cent share — and one slap shot. 84.6 mph at the 10th percentile.

So the shot is soft, the volume is small, and it does not matter, because all of it happens from twelve feet. He scores by being in the blue paint when the puck arrives, and 15 goals in 121 career games at 13.5 per cent is what that produces from eleven minutes a night.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 218 pounds, with 60 penalty minutes in 79 games and 83 in 121 career games.

Top speed 22.9 mph at the 84th percentile, 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 23rd, and 1.76 miles a game at the 6th percentile — which is eleven minutes of ice time and a game played inside forty feet of the net.

He is punishing, he finishes every check, and he fights, and at 6-3 and 218 pounds on a fourth line taking defensive-zone starts that is precisely the role.

He wins pucks along the wall and below the goal line by leaning on people, which is where a 12-foot median actually comes from: he is not being set up in the slot, he is taking the puck off somebody behind the net.

60 penalty minutes in eleven minutes a night is a high rate and the club will accept every one of them.

The Intangibles

A hundred and twenty-eighth overall in 2014, the fifth round, three seasons, 121 games, 32 points across St. Louis and Vancouver.

15 goals and 17 assists, and a minus-13.

He is twenty-seven, drafted nine years ago by a club he never played for, and last season was the first in which he played a full one.

A fifth-round pick who reaches the league at twenty-six and scores eleven goals from twelve feet is a perfectly good fourth-line story. What the file cannot say is whether the 22 per cent close-range conversion holds, and on fifty shots it should not be assumed.