Dougie Hamilton

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

22 goals and 52 assists in 82 games — 74 points — at 21:46 a night. Plus-23, 275 shots, 50 penalty minutes, seven game-winners, eight goals on the power play.

Twenty-two goals from a defenceman, and 1,431 five-on-five minutes, the most of any Devil.

55.9 per cent of the expected goals, the 91st percentile, with his ice at 81-56 against an expectation of 73.51-57.99. Seven and a half goals better than the chances at the attacking end and two better at the defensive.

He started 56.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 81st percentile, 534 attacking draws against 404.

Eleven seasons, 751 games, 445 points, across four organisations.

The Finesse Game

275 shots at a median of 46 feet, 68 per cent of them from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 182 shots on goal and 10 goals — 5.49 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Only Brent Burns put more long shots on goal in the league, and Burns scored one fewer. From twenty to forty: 73 shots and 10 goals, 13.70 per cent, against a positional rate of 8.83.

He is above the league’s rate from both distances, and the ten goals from mid-range on seventy-three shots are the ones that pay. This is the second blue line in this edition where the point shot survives the arithmetic that has been killing it everywhere else.

108 slap shots and 108 snap shots out of 378 tracked attempts, with 145 wrist shots — a genuinely mixed release from the point, which is rarer than it sounds.

97.7 mph at the 90th percentile, on that slap volume, so it means what it says. 52 assists and 308 in his career: the shot is what people notice and the first pass out is what the club is paying for.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 230 pounds, and here is the reading that will not sit still.

Top speed 21.1 mph, the 5th percentile. Bursts above twenty miles an hour, 0.1 a game — the 2nd percentile. Distance covered, 3.17 miles a game, the 88th.

He is among the slowest measured skaters in the league and among the highest-mileage ones, and both are true at once. That combination is the top-pair job description rather than a verdict: twenty-two minutes a night is a great deal of skating and almost none of it is a sprint. It does mean that when he is beaten wide there is no second gear to recover with.

50 penalty minutes and a 6-6 frame he uses to take away space rather than to hit. He defends with reach and position, not with contact, and at thirty he is not going to start.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2011, and Boston, Calgary, Carolina and New Jersey since — four organisations for a defenceman who has scored at a first-pair rate in all of them.

He played sixty-two games in 2021-22, his first here, and came back to eighty-two and seventy-four points.

The honest projection is about the skating. A defenceman playing this many minutes on the 5th percentile of measured speed is doing it on reading the play, and reading the play is the last thing to go — but when it does there is nothing underneath it.