Jacob Trouba

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

8 goals and 22 assists in 82 games — 30 points — at 21:12 a night. Plus-7, 199 shots at 4.0 per cent, one shorthanded goal, 63 penalty minutes.

1,466 five-on-five minutes, second on the club to K’Andre Miller.

48.9 per cent of the expected goals, the 41st percentile, with his ice at 66-69 against an expectation of 59.85-62.62.

He started 47.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 36th percentile: 379 attacking draws against 416, which is the hardest deployment given to any Ranger defenceman.

Ten seasons, 679 games, 287 points, 531 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

199 shots at a median of 52 feet, 77 per cent of them from beyond forty, and eight goals.

Beyond forty feet: 150 shots on goal and 2 goals — 1.33 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Only five defencemen in the league put more long shots on net, and none of them converted anywhere near this badly.

And this is the report where a claim made three chapters ago has to be corrected. Nashville’s blue line was written up on the argument that a point shot from beyond forty feet pays when it is a real slap shot and does not when it is a wrist shot into a shin pad. Trouba slaps 79 of his 252 tracked attempts — 31 per cent — and converts at 1.33.

So the mechanism was too strong as stated, and this book has now measured it. Across the 109 defencemen who put sixty or more shots on goal from beyond forty feet, the correlation between slap-shot share and long-range conversion is r = 0.291, and the quartiles run 2.48 per cent, 3.22, 3.96 and 4.00. The slap shot is a floor rather than a lift. Take none of them and you score nothing from range; take a great many and you get to about four per cent. It does not reach Josi’s 6.79 and it does not explain Trouba’s 1.33.

98.6 mph at the 94th percentile, on that slap count, so the shot itself is genuinely among the hardest in the league. It goes into shins.

217 career assists against 70 goals. The first pass is the honest half of the offensive file.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 212, with 63 penalty minutes and 531 in his career.

And an unusual pair of readings: top speed 23.2 mph, the 90th percentile — and 0.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 5th. He can reach a speed almost nobody at the position reaches and does so once every five games. 2.92 miles a game, the 76th percentile.

What that describes is a defenceman who never chases and never needs to, because he steps up into the puck carrier instead.

He is one of the heaviest open-ice hitters in the league and the captain of this club. The hit is the identity, the penalty minutes are the cost, and the 41st-percentile chance share out of the hardest zone starts on the blue line is the honest middle of it.

The Intangibles

Ninth overall in 2012 to Winnipeg, six seasons there, and four here, with the captaincy.

70 goals and 217 assists in 679 games, on a shot that measures among the hardest in the sport and has produced eight goals in a season once.

He is twenty-nine, signed long, and the file is entirely about whether a defenceman whose value is the body and the first pass is worth twenty-one minutes a night when the offence has stopped. The chance share says it is close.