Filip Hronek

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 30 assists in 64 games — 39 points — at 21:42 a night between Detroit and Vancouver. Plus-7, 124 shots at 7.3 per cent, four on the power play, 34 penalty minutes.

39 points is a career high by one, in his fifth season.

46.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,096 minutes, the 22nd percentile, with his ice at 47-38 against an expectation of 37.28-43.05.

Ten more goals scored than the chances called for and five fewer allowed — a fifteen-goal swing in his favour, on a 22nd-percentile chance share. The plus-7 is entirely made of that, and it is the first thing a reader should distrust.

He started 43.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 23rd percentile: 260 attacking draws against 333 defensive ones. Genuinely hard minutes, and the chance share is what came out of them.

The Finesse Game

124 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 75 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 9 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 87 shots on goal and five goals — 5.75 per cent, well above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 15 shots and three goals, 20.00 per cent. Inside twenty: 13 shots and one goal.

168 tracked attempts, 54 of them slap shots — a 32.1 per cent share — and a shot measured at 98.3 mph, the 93rd percentile.

He is the one of the three big shooters on this blue line whose long-range work paid. Eighty-seven shots on goal from the point is a very large volume and 5.75 per cent is close to double the rate, and this book has now printed enough of these to say the honest thing: it neither confirms the mechanism nor refutes it. On these volumes, a season of point shots is mostly noise, and the way to tell is to ask again next year.

30 goals and 127 assists in 309 career games. The passing is the durable half; a career 5.3 per cent is the other.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190 pounds, with 34 penalty minutes in 64 games and 162 in 309 career games.

3.17 miles a game at the 89th percentile, at a top speed of 22.0 mph, the 36th, with 0.7 bursts above twenty a game at the 35th.

A great deal of ground covered without ever being quick — the same shape as most of the mobile defencemen in this book, and it means skating rather than speed.

He moves the puck out under pressure and joins the rush behind it, which is what a right-handed defenceman with 127 assists in 309 games is for.

He is not physical and at 190 pounds does not win a battle in front of his own net, which is the half of the job the 22nd-percentile chance share is complaining about.

The Intangibles

Fifty-third overall in 2016, the second round, five seasons, 309 games, 157 points across Detroit and Vancouver.

30 goals and 127 assists, and a minus-88 in 309 games — a figure that belongs mostly to four seasons on a Detroit club that was rebuilding, but is still the largest on this roster.

He is twenty-five, right-handed, and cost Vancouver a first-round pick at the deadline.

What the file describes is a genuine top-four puck-mover with real offensive production and a chance share that has not once been on the right side of even. The price says the club is betting the second half was Detroit. The 22nd percentile last season, part of it in Vancouver, says the bet is not yet won.