Dylan DeMelo

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

6 goals and 21 assists in 75 games — 27 points — at 19:34 a night. Plus-10, 93 shots at 6.5 per cent, one shorthanded, 50 penalty minutes.

27 points is a career high by seven, and six goals is a career high by two, in his eighth season.

52.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,254 minutes, the 66th percentile, with his ice at 53-50 against an expectation of 51.33-46.50.

He started 50.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 46th percentile: 359 attacking draws against 357 defensive ones. Dead even, and a 66th-percentile chance share out of it — the second-best combination of those two numbers on this blue line.

The Finesse Game

93 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 71 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 7 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 64 shots on goal and two goals — 3.13 per cent, on the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 14 shots and three goals, 21.43 per cent. Inside twenty: 11 shots and one goal.

136 tracked attempts, 89 of them wrist shots — a 65.4 per cent share — and only 24 slap. His shot is measured at 91.7 mph, the 57th percentile.

14 goals in 472 career games at 2.6 per cent — the lowest career shooting rate of the 101 defencemen in this book with four hundred or more games.

Six goals last season is three-quarters of everything he had scored in the seven seasons before it.

The 99 career assists against 14 goals are the file: he takes the puck off the wall, he makes the first pass, and nothing else in the offensive record exists.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 194 pounds, with 50 penalty minutes in 75 games and 229 in 472 career games.

Top speed 21.5 mph at the 12th percentile, 0.1 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 1st percentile — and 2.57 miles a game at the 50th.

He reached twenty miles an hour eight times in seventy-five games. That is one of the slowest tracking lines of any regular defenceman in this book, and he plays twenty minutes a night on the second pair of a playoff club.

He defends by position and by never being out of it, which is the only method available at that top speed and it works because the reads are early.

He is not physical and does not clear a crease, and the 50 penalty minutes are the fouls of a slow defenceman who has been beaten and has to reach.

The Intangibles

A hundred and seventy-ninth overall in 2011, the sixth round, eight seasons, 472 games, 113 points across San Jose, Ottawa and Winnipeg.

14 goals and 99 assists, and a plus-34.

He is thirty, and he has been the second-pair right-handed defenceman on a playoff club for four seasons without anybody outside Winnipeg noticing.

A sixth-round pick with four hundred and seventy games, a 2.6 per cent shooting rate and a positive chance share out of even starts is exactly the sort of file this book exists for. He does one thing, he does it every night, and no statistic anybody prints records it.