Jake McCabe

Last Season

Five goals and 20 assists in 80 games — 25 points, plus-three, at 22:24 a night with 64 penalty minutes.

His 723rd career game.

The Finesse Game

A hundred and fifteen unblocked attempts from a median of 48 feet, five goals. Forty goals in 723 career games.

Twenty assists in 80 games is a fair return for a defensive defenceman and rather more than the position usually gives him credit for.

The Physical Game

Six foot one, 210, and he plays a genuinely hard, punishing game — he finishes checks, blocks shots, and defends the front of his net properly. Sixty-four penalty minutes.

The skating is honest and he is beaten wide by real speed, which at twenty-two minutes a night against top lines happens often.

The Intangibles

Forty-six point five per cent of the expected goals, 21st percentile, and 44.1 per cent of the shot attempts, seventh percentile, across 1,482 minutes — the heaviest workload on the club — with the chances 56.5 for and 65.0 against.

The goals came out level at 68-68, and the plus-three is the only positive figure among Toronto’s regular defencemen.

Five points in his last ten, two of them goals. He is 32, and he is being asked to play first-pair minutes on a club that finished 44.8 per cent in attempts. Nobody survives that assignment with a good number, and he did not.