Haydn Fleury

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

No goals and 1 assist in 29 games — 1 point — at 12:48 a night. Minus-10, 33 shots, 14 penalty minutes.

One point in twenty-nine games, and a minus-10 in 345 five-on-five minutes on a club that finished thirteenth.

48.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 34th percentile, with his ice at 6-16 against an expectation of 11.80-12.34 — six goals short at the good end and four worse at the other.

He started 47.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 35th percentile, which is close to neutral.

Three hundred and forty-five minutes is a month of a regular’s season, and a ten-goal swing against the chances inside it is bad luck as much as anything. It is also the fourth consecutive season in which the record has come out this way.

The Finesse Game

33 shots at a median of 54 feet — the longest on this roster — with 73 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 17 shots on goal and none. From twenty to forty: nine shots and none. Inside twenty: five shots and none. Thirty-one shots on goal in a season and not one of them went in.

Nine goals in 244 career games at a 2.9 per cent shooting percentage.

51 tracked attempts, nine of them slap shots. 90.8 mph at the 49th percentile — an ordinary shot for a defenceman, used rarely.

The first pass is safe and slow, and on a third pair that is survivable. The absence of any offensive threat from the point is not, on a club with this much skill in front of it.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 207 pounds, which is tall and light. Top speed 22.8 mph at the 77th percentile, 0.9 bursts above twenty a game at the 51st, 1.85 miles a game at the 9th.

Thirteen minutes a night explains the mileage. The speed measures are genuinely good for a 6-4 defenceman and are the most encouraging thing in a file that has very little else.

14 penalty minutes in 29 games and 59 in 244 career games — a low rate, and for a 6-4 defenceman it is the wrong kind of low: he does not initiate.

He defends with reach rather than weight, and at 207 pounds on a 6-4 frame the contact at the net front is not what it should be.

The Intangibles

Seventh overall in 2014, six seasons, 244 games, 32 points across Carolina, Anaheim, Seattle and Tampa Bay.

Nine goals and 23 assists in six years, and a minus-22. A seventh-overall defenceman who is a seventh defenceman at twenty-seven is one of the plainer disappointments in this edition.

He is twenty-seven, on a club that has won two of the last four and needs a seventh defenceman rather than a project.

What the file records is a large, reasonably quick defenceman who has never been able to do the one thing a top-four defenceman must: make the play that ends the shift.