Drew Doughty

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

Thirty-nine of eighty-two games, at 25:44 in each of them. Seven goals and 24 assists is a 65-point pace, which would have beaten the 60 of 2017-18 for the best season of his career. He was plus-4, and nobody who watched the year will remember that.

1,014 games and 567 points — seventh in both among the 223 defencemen in this book.

The Finesse Game

He misses the percentile tables, which want forty games, so this is the raw record. 56.3 per cent of the five-on-five expected goals across 764 minutes, second among the club’s defencemen behind Alexander Edler. His ice went 36-33 against an expectation of 35.47-27.50 — he beat the model going forward and his goaltending handed it back.

99 shots at a 51-foot median, ten per cent inside twenty feet, seventy-one per cent from beyond forty, at 98.3 mph — second-hardest on the roster behind Arthur Kaliyev. He shoots from the line and the puck arrives early.

Then the pair file, which is emphatic. Viktor Arvidsson took 65.3 per cent of the chances with him and 55.6 without. Phillip Danault, 66.1 and 53.9. Trevor Moore, 63.7 and 53.5. Mikey Anderson, 57.7 beside him and 48.8 alone. Doughty himself sits at 50-52 per cent when those forwards are on the bench, so this is not a passenger on a good line — the same men get worse the moment he leaves.

The Physical Game

Thirty penalty minutes in thirty-nine games. He is not a punisher and is not asked to be one; the job is 25:44 against the other team’s best and the first unit of both special teams.

The absence is the physical story. A club that gets 764 five-on-five minutes from its best defenceman instead of 1,600 has to find the other eight hundred somewhere, and where Los Angeles found them was Tobias Bjornfot and Sean Durzi — a 21-year-old with the worst possession record on the club, and a first-year man.

The Intangibles

3.53 miles a game is the 97th percentile of the 568 skaters who played forty, at a top speed of 21.5 mph, the 14th. He covers more ground than almost anybody and is quick almost never — the shape the chips keep finding under good defencemen, and the reason a raw speed percentile says nothing useful on its own.

Fourteen years, 1,014 games and one club, and a pair file in which three different forwards played their best hockey of the season beside him. At 32, with the last two seasons at 67 and 39 games, the only real question about him is availability — and nothing in this data forecasts that.