Drew Doughty

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

9 goals and 43 assists in 81 games — 52 points — at 26:14 a night. Plus-12, 145 shots, 34 penalty minutes.

That 26:14 is second in the league to Makar’s 26:23, and Makar played sixty games to his eighty-one. No man who played a full season was on the ice more.

53.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 78th percentile, with his ice at 59-55 against an expectation of 65.72-57.22 — seven goals short of the chances at the offensive end.

His zone starts came out exactly even at 50.2 per cent, the 47th percentile, so the assignment was not sheltered and was not punishing either. What was not even was the workload: twenty-six minutes a night, at thirty-three, and 52 points came out of it. The season before he had played thirty-nine games.

Fifteen seasons, 1,095 games, 619 points, all of them in Los Angeles.

The Finesse Game

145 shots at a median of 49 feet, 7 per cent from inside twenty and 72 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 105 shots on goal, 4 goals, 3.81 per cent — a shade above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Inside forty: 38 shots, 5 goals.

Ninety-five slap shots out of 199 tracked attempts — nearly half, at a time when the league-wide share of unblocked shots taken as slap shots has fallen from 17.39 per cent in 2017-18 to 12.07, and among defencemen from 35.89 to 24.17. He is one of the last men playing the position the way it was played when he arrived.

96.2 mph at the 85th percentile, which for once is a fair reading rather than a slap-shot artefact: he takes enough of them for the number to mean something.

Forty-three assists equals the second-highest total of his career, and he first reached it in 2009-10. The puck moves through him — Los Angeles ran the sixth-best shot-attempt share in the league and he was on the ice for a quarter of the game.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 210, and 34 penalty minutes.

Top speed 21.3 mph, the 9th percentile. Distance 3.60 miles a game, the 98th.

That combination is not the finding it looks like. Of the 192 defencemen who played forty games last season, 59 covered three miles a game, and 24 of those 59 never broke 22 mph. It is the top-pair job description, not a verdict on a man’s skating: play twenty-six minutes and the mileage arrives whether you are quick or not.

What can be said is that he is at the bottom of the measured range even inside that group, and he is thirty-three. He defends with position, angle and stick, and he has not beaten anyone to a puck in a straight line for some years.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2008, a Norris Trophy, two Stanley Cups, and a sixteenth season in the same sweater ahead of him.

Los Angeles allowed the second-fewest expected goals per sixty at even strength in the entire league last season. He plays a quarter of every game against the other club’s best line, from a zone-start share that is dead even. How much of that second-place rate is him is not separable from the system, and the book will not pretend it is.

The reservation is the age and nothing else. The 21.3 mph is not going up.