Photo by Michael Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ian Cole
Chicago Blackhawks Defense #28
Nine hundred and ninety games, thirty-seven years old, and the eighty-second percentile.
| Season | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-26 | 82 | 3 | 20 | 23 | +16 | 50 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 62 | 4.8 | 18:16 |
| Career | 990 | 38 | 195 | 233 | +168 | 871 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 1002 | 3.8 | 18:01 |
Last Season
Three goals and 20 assists in all 82 games, plus-16, at 18:16 a night with 50 penalty minutes. His five-on-five work was done in Utah.
The Finesse Game
None to speak of and none required. A hundred and eight unblocked attempts from a median of 52 feet, twelve per cent inside twenty, three goals. Thirty-eight goals in 990 career games.
The first pass is quick and correct, which after sixteen seasons is less a skill than a reflex.
The Physical Game
Six foot one and 237 pounds, which is heavy even by defensive-defenceman standards, and he uses all of it in front of his own net. Fifty penalty minutes.
The skating went years ago. He survives by never being in a race — the positioning is good enough that he does not have to recover.
The Intangibles
Fifty-three point seven per cent of the expected goals, 82nd percentile, and the goals 60-44 in his favour across 1,240 minutes, at 36 years old.
He arrives on a club where every incumbent defenceman finished in the bottom fifteenth percentile, which makes him — on last season’s evidence — comfortably the best defensive defenceman on the roster and by a distance the oldest.
Sixteen seasons, 990 games, a Stanley Cup. Chicago has two teenagers and a twenty-three-year-old on its blue line, and it has just signed the man who will teach them where to stand. That is the whole of the reasoning and it is sound.