Dysin Mayo

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

4 goals and 8 assists in 67 games — 12 points at 20:55 a night, minus-22, on 76 shots and 27 penalty minutes.

Twenty-one minutes a night in a first NHL season at twenty-five. He had spent five years in the American league before Arizona ran out of defencemen.

38.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,186 minutes — the lowest of the 202 defencemen who played 40 games and 500 minutes — and 40.0 per cent of the shot attempts, also the lowest of them. His ice went 38-66 against an expectation of 36.65-58.82: the scoring landed where the chances said, and seven more went in behind him than they predicted.

The with-and-without-you is the most damaging page in this book and it is not close. Every regular he played meaningful minutes with was worse for it:

Shayne Gostisbehere with him took 38.4 per cent across 1,626 attempts — and 48.4 in the minutes without him. Clayton Keller was 33.9 beside him and 51.7 away. Barrett Hayton, 34.8 and 52.6. Travis Boyd, 34.1 and 47.3. Nick Schmaltz, 40.2 and 49.7. Five men, five collapses, none smaller than seven points and the largest eighteen.

Mayo apart from Gostisbehere was 38.2, so it is not that the pairing was badly chosen. It is that this is what he is.

The Finesse Game

0.60 even-strength points per 60 is the 13th percentile among defencemen and 3.25 shots per 60 the 19th. He took six seconds a night of power play across the season and scored none of his points on it.

76 attempts at a median of 48 feet with 6 per cent from inside 20. Four goals. There is nothing here and there was never expected to be.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190, and this half is genuinely good. 5.69 blocks per 60 is the 87th percentile among defencemen and 5.52 hits per 60 the 71st. He is willing, he is in the lane, and he finishes what he starts.

2:58 a night shorthanded, the 95th percentile among defencemen — the coaching staff trusted him with the job that most exposes a defenceman, all season, on the worst penalty kill in hockey.

The legs are the problem. 7.83 miles per sixty is the 4th percentile among defencemen and 1.0 bursts above 20 mph per 60 is the 29th, at a top speed of 21.7. He cannot get to a puck first and he cannot recover when he is beaten to one, and twenty-one minutes a night is a great many opportunities to demonstrate both.

37.3 per cent of his even-strength time was spent in the offensive zone, the 0th percentile among defencemen. Some of that is deployment. Most of it is that the puck did not leave his end.

The Intangibles

One hundred and thirty-third overall in 2014, five seasons in Tucson, and a first NHL season at twenty-five on a club that had nobody else.

He is 26. Nothing on this page is a criticism of the man — he was asked to play top-pair minutes on the worst possession club in hockey and he did not refuse. It is a criticism of the club that asked. Arizona has to find a way to play him twelve minutes rather than twenty-one, and on a roster that also owns the second- and third-lowest chance shares among qualified defencemen — Patrik Nemeth at 39.2 and J.J. Moser at 40.1 — there is no obvious way to do it.