Gabriel Carlsson

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

38 games for Columbus, 2 goals and 7 assists at 12:16 a night, plus-6, ten penalty minutes, 18 shots. Twenty-ninth overall in 2015 by Columbus, six seasons, 75 games, 16 points.

Four hundred and forty-four minutes of five-on-five ice and thirty-eight games are both short of the gate this book uses, so what follows is described rather than ranked.

The Finesse Game

2.32 shots per 60 is a very low rate even for a third-pair defenceman, from a 49-foot median with fourteen per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet, and two goals from eighteen shots.

1.23 even-strength points per 60, and none of his nine points came on the power play — none in seventy-five career games.

0.51 giveaways per 60 against 0.90 takeaways is the tidiest pair of hands in this chapter, on a sample too small to lean on.

46.8 per cent of the expected goals against 47.9 per cent of the attempts across 444 five-on-five minutes, out of 55.4 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 172nd-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.

His ice went 24-17 against an expectation of 17.48-19.86 — six and a half better than the model in front and nearly three fewer against, on a Columbus club that finished 23rd in attempt share and conceded three hundred goals.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 195 pounds, and ten penalty minutes in thirty-eight games — twenty-two across seventy-five.

4.25 blocks per 60 and 3.48 hits, with 0:42 a night short-handed, and 0.64 penalties drawn per 60 against 0.64 taken.

A 6-5 defenceman hitting at that rate is low, and there is not enough here to say whether it is a style or a man being careful in a job he has never held for a full season.

The Intangibles

20.7 mph and 0.77 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60, both drawn from thirty-eight games and both very low — the slowest top speed in this chapter. A maximum scales with the shifts a man takes, so the figure is described rather than ranked, and 8.73 miles per 60 is a fair amount of ground.

His shot is 94.9 mph.

He is 25, twenty-ninth overall in 2015, with sixteen points in seventy-five games across six seasons. Seventy-five games in six years is the number the file turns on, and the on-ice ledger from thirty-eight of them is the only encouraging thing in it. The skating measurements say why the other five seasons happened.