Garnet Hathaway

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

13 goals and 9 assists in 84 games — 22 points — split between Washington and Boston, at 11:48 a night. Plus-5, 88 shots at 14.8 per cent, three game-winners, 69 penalty minutes.

Eighty-four games, because the trade fell between two schedules.

50.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 55th percentile, with his ice at 33-28 against an expectation of 33.83-33.47 across 861 minutes — five and a half goals better than the chances at the defensive end.

And the deployment: 95 attacking-zone draws against 437 — 17.9 per cent, and no skater in this book but Tomas Nosek and Nic Dowd started fewer of his shifts in the attacking end.

This is where a thread from the New Jersey chapter closes. Three of the five most defensively deployed forwards in this edition played for the 65-win Bruins last season — Nosek at 12.5 per cent, Hathaway at 17.9 and Nick Foligno at 20.2 — and all three are on other clubs now. Whatever that line was worth, Boston did not pay to keep it.

Eight seasons, 457 games, 122 points, 490 penalty minutes, and he was never drafted.

The Finesse Game

88 shots at a median of 18 feet, and thirteen goals at 14.8 per cent — a career high in both.

Inside twenty feet: 46 shots on goal and 9 goals — 19.57 per cent, above the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 25 shots and 3 goals, 12.00 per cent. Beyond forty: 11 shots and 1 goal.

Above the league from close on a real sample, from a fourth-line winger who begins four shifts in five in his own end. Getting to the front of the net at all from there is most of the achievement.

49 wrist shots out of 119 tracked attempts, with 22 tip-ins and 17 backhands and three slap shots. Everything is close, redirected or from below the goal line.

64 career assists against 58 goals. The play does not run through him and never has.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 212, with 69 penalty minutes and 490 in his career.

Top speed 22.6 mph, the 68th percentile; 1.3 bursts a game, the 67th; 1.91 miles a game, the 12th percentile — which is twelve minutes a night in short shifts out of his own end.

He hits everything, forechecks into contact, and fights. At 212 pounds and eight seasons of it, the willingness is the whole product.

What the deployment says is that three coaching staffs have decided he can be sent out with the puck in the wrong end, and the 55th-percentile chance share says they were right.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Brown, and 457 NHL games across Calgary, Washington, Boston and now here.

58 goals, 64 assists and 490 penalty minutes, with the best goal total and the best rate of the eight seasons coming in the last one at thirty-one.

He is thirty-one on a rebuilding club that finished twenty-ninth in goals. The role is a fourth-line right wing who kills penalties and starts every shift in the defensive zone, and the record says he is genuinely good at it.