This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Dante Fabbro
Nashville Predators Defense
One hundred and one shots on goal and two goals, seventy-two of them from beyond forty feet for nothing.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | NSH | 4 | 1 | 0 | 1 | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 20.0 | 12:44 |
| 2019-20 | NSH | 64 | 5 | 6 | 11 | -7 | 38 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 92 | 5.4 | 19:02 |
| 2020-21 | NSH | 40 | 2 | 10 | 12 | -1 | 23 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 59 | 3.4 | 19:19 |
| 2021-22 | NSH | 66 | 3 | 21 | 24 | +13 | 24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 88 | 3.4 | 19:03 |
| 2022-23 | NSH | 79 | 2 | 9 | 11 | -4 | 50 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 101 | 2.0 | 17:27 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 253 | 13 | 46 | 59 | 0 | 135 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 345 | 3.8 | 18:29 |
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 9 assists in 79 games — 11 points — at 17:27 a night. Minus-4, 101 shots at 1.98 per cent, 50 penalty minutes.
One hundred and one shots on goal and two goals is one of the lowest conversion rates of any defenceman in these five chapters, and it came on the highest shot volume of the three.
47.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 36th percentile, with his ice at 36-45 against an expectation of 46.81-50.93 — eleven goals short at the offensive end, which on a club that finished twenty-seventh in finishing is mostly the club.
He started 45.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 30th percentile.
Five seasons, 253 games, 59 points, all of them in Nashville.
The Finesse Game
101 shots at a median of 52 feet, 6 per cent from inside twenty and 78 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty feet: 72 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 24 shots, 2 goals.
Seventy-two long shots and nothing. On the same blue line, Josi took 162 and scored 11 and Barrie took 111 and scored 9. The difference is not the distance — it is the shot: Josi took a hundred slap shots and Barrie seventy-six, and Fabbro took ten.
That is the sharpest illustration in this edition of why the forty-foot finding is about shot quality and not about geometry alone.
89.5 mph at the 41st percentile.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 200, and 50 penalty minutes in 79 games.
Top speed 21.1 mph, the 5th percentile. Bursts 0.1 a game, the 2nd percentile. Those are among the lowest readings on any defenceman playing seventeen minutes in the league.
2.37 miles a game, the 36th percentile — and that combination is different from Josi’s. Josi is slow and covers enormous ground; Fabbro is slow and does not.
He defends by position and takes the body when he can get there. Fifty penalty minutes from a third-pair defenceman is a high rate and a good share of it is the arithmetic of arriving late.
The Intangibles
Seventeenth overall in 2016 out of Boston University, five seasons in Nashville, and 59 points in 253 games.
He was a first-round pick and is now a third-pair defenceman at twenty-five. The tracking says the skating is the reason and this book believes it: the 5th percentile in top speed and the 2nd in bursts is not a profile that survives against a modern forecheck.
What he does have is 79 games and a penalty kill. That is a real job and it is not the one a seventeenth-overall pick was drafted for.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
- durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“Fifty penalty minutes from a third-pair defenceman is a high rate and a good share of it is the arithmetic of arriving late.”
“What he does have is 79 games and a penalty kill.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,195 minutes
- Expected goals
- 47.9%
- 37th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.2%
- 39th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 45 against. Expected: 46.8 and 50.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 25 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.
Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 56 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 79 games
- Top speed
- 21.1 mph
- 31st pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.13 a game
- Distance
- 2.37 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 89.5 mph
- 37th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2022-23 · 1195 minutes at five-on-five
- Roman Josi24%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2022-23
- The club
- NSH took 47.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.9% — 0.9 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,195 minutes at five-on-five — 82nd percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roman Josi | 49.5% | 47.3% | 49.7% |
| Colton Sissons | 41.8% | 50.0% | 45.4% |
| Jeremy Lauzon | 49.8% | 47.2% | 41.7% |
49.5% together, 47.3% for him apart and 49.7% for Josi apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
127 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 2 of them goals. His median goal came from 28 feet. 6% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 78% from beyond forty.