Ian Cole

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

3 goals and 14 assists in 78 games — 17 points — at 19:23 a night for Tampa Bay. Plus-13, 109 shots at 2.8 per cent, 61 penalty minutes.

53.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,264 minutes, the 74th percentile, with his ice at 52-49 against an expectation of 53.99-47.16.

He started 44.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 24th percentile: 293 attacking draws against 372 defensive ones. A 74th-percentile chance share out of the 24th percentile of starts is the best combination of those two numbers of any defenceman on this roster who played a thousand minutes.

That is what he has done for thirteen years, on seven clubs, and the career plus-minus is the accumulation of it.

The Finesse Game

109 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 75 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 9 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 77 shots on goal and one goal — 1.30 per cent, well below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 21 shots and no goals. Inside twenty: 10 shots and one goal.

147 tracked attempts, 50 of them slap shots — a 34.0 per cent share — and a shot measured at 97.3 mph, the 89th percentile.

So Vancouver’s blue line now contains three separate versions of the same experiment. Cole slaps a third of his attempts at 97 mph and got one goal from seventy-seven long shots. Tyler Myers slaps a quarter of his at 98 and got one from sixty-three. Filip Hronek slaps a third of his at 98 and got five from eighty-seven — nearly double the positional rate. Same shot, same distance, same share, three different answers, and the only honest conclusion is the one this edition reached the hard way: the wind-up does not decide it.

32 goals in 748 career games at 3.9 per cent. There has never been offence here and nobody has ever asked for any.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 237 pounds, which is heavy, with 61 penalty minutes in 78 games and 683 in 748 career games.

A top speed of 21.4 mph, the 11th percentile, and 0.3 bursts above twenty a game, the 10th. He covers 2.58 miles a game, the 51st.

He is slow. That is not a hedge or a reading — it is two measurements in the bottom eighth of the league, from a defenceman playing nineteen minutes a night against other clubs’ best.

He defends by taking away the ice in front of him and finishing every check that arrives, and at 237 pounds in front of his own net there is nothing subtle about the method.

He clears the crease, and the 683 penalty minutes are the cost of doing it for thirteen years.

How a man this slow holds a 74th-percentile chance share out of the 24th percentile of starts is the interesting question in the file, and the answer is position: he is where the puck is going before the man who is faster than him has decided to go there.

The Intangibles

Eighteenth overall in 2007, thirteen seasons, 748 games, 182 points across St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Colorado, Minnesota, Carolina and Tampa Bay, and two Stanley Cups with Pittsburgh in 2016 and 2017.

32 goals and 150 assists, and a career plus-144 — the seventh-highest of the 639 skaters in this book, behind Brad Marchand, Ryan McDonagh, Sidney Crosby, Joe Pavelski, Victor Hedman and Ondrej Palat.

That list is six players who spent their careers on the best teams in the league, and one journeyman defenceman who has changed clubs seven times.

He is thirty-four, signed by a club that finished twenty-fourth in chance share and needs somebody to take its defensive-zone starts. This is the least glamorous signing on the roster and, on the record above, one of the more defensible ones.