This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Jake McCabe
Toronto Maple Leafs Defense
Twelve hundred and ninety-two minutes, a career high in points, and an on-ice goal record sixteen better than the chances.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | BUF | 7 | 0 | 1 | 1 | -3 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0.0 | 15:13 |
| 2014-15 | BUF | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0.0 | 11:08 |
| 2015-16 | BUF | 77 | 4 | 10 | 14 | +6 | 51 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 62 | 6.5 | 19:07 |
| 2016-17 | BUF | 76 | 3 | 17 | 20 | -7 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 79 | 3.8 | 20:42 |
| 2017-18 | BUF | 53 | 3 | 9 | 12 | -11 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 53 | 5.7 | 19:30 |
| 2018-19 | BUF | 59 | 4 | 10 | 14 | -4 | 35 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 64 | 6.3 | 18:57 |
| 2019-20 | BUF | 66 | 3 | 10 | 13 | -11 | 41 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 75 | 4.0 | 18:32 |
| 2020-21 | BUF | 13 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +2 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 15 | 6.7 | 19:11 |
| 2021-22 | CHI | 75 | 4 | 18 | 22 | -27 | 33 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 80 | 5.0 | 20:18 |
| 2022-23 | CHI/TOR | 76 | 3 | 22 | 25 | +19 | 56 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 96 | 3.1 | 19:29 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 504 | 25 | 99 | 124 | -36 | 292 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 527 | 4.7 | 19:27 |
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 22 assists in 76 games — 25 points — at 19:29 a night between Chicago and Toronto. Plus-19, 96 shots at 3.1 per cent, 56 penalty minutes.
25 points is a career high, in his tenth season.
49.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,292 minutes — the most of any defenceman on this roster — with his ice at 61-47 against an expectation of 52.52-54.49.
That last line is the whole file in one row. The chances on his ice were slightly against him and the goals came out sixteen to the good: eight and a half more scored than expected, seven and a half fewer allowed. Both halves of that are the work of the men in front of him and the goaltender behind him, and neither is likely to repeat.
He started 49.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 43rd percentile: 398 attacking draws against 408 defensive ones. An even split, on a club that had softer places to put him.
The Finesse Game
96 shots at a median of 47 feet, with 65 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 10 per cent from inside twenty.
Beyond forty feet: 55 shots on goal and two goals — 3.64 per cent, on the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 26 shots and one goal, 3.85 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: six shots and no goals.
Three goals in a season and 25 in 504 career games at 4.7 per cent. There is no offence here and there never has been.
135 tracked attempts, 87 of them wrist shots and 16 slap. 93.8 mph at the 70th percentile.
The 22 assists are the outlier, not the shot. They are the most he has managed and they came from a first pair on a good club rather than from anything new in his hands.
The Physical Game
6-1 and 210 pounds, with 56 penalty minutes in 76 games and 292 in 504 career games.
Top speed 21.9 mph at the 33rd percentile, 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 28th, 2.74 miles a game at the 63rd. Slow, and covering ordinary ground.
He is punishing, he finishes his checks, and the penalty totals are what a defenceman who plays that way collects.
He gets in the lane rather than reaching, which is the method available to a defenceman who cannot recover once he is beaten, and it is the reason the deployment is even rather than sheltered.
The reach is ordinary and the feet are worse. Everything in this file is positioning, contact and willingness.
The Intangibles
Forty-fourth overall in 2012, the second round, ten seasons, 504 games, 124 points across Buffalo, Chicago and Toronto.
25 goals and 99 assists, and a minus-36 that belongs almost entirely to seven seasons in Buffalo and one in Chicago.
He is thirty, on a club that finished fourth in the league, playing more five-on-five minutes last season than any defenceman on this roster.
What the record says is that he is a competent, physical, entirely unspectacular top-four defenceman who has spent a decade on bad teams and is now on a good one. The plus-19 is new; the player is not.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
- he lacks itraised, and he does not have it
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
“He is punishing, he finishes his checks, and the penalty totals are what a defenceman who plays that way collects.”
“He gets in the lane rather than reaching, which is the method available to a defenceman who cannot recover once he is beaten, and it is the reason the deployment is even rather than sheltered.”
“The reach is ordinary and the feet are worse.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,292 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.1%
- 45th pct
- Shot attempts
- 48.3%
- 40th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 61 for, 47 against. Expected: 52.5 and 54.5.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 13 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.
Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 67 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 76 games
- Top speed
- 21.9 mph
- 64th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.57 a game
- Distance
- 2.74 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 93.8 mph
- 61st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2022-23 with CHI · 938 minutes at five-on-five
- Seth Jones57%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2022-23
- The club
- TOR took 54.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.1% — 5.4 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 1,292 minutes at five-on-five — 89th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seth Jones | 47.5% | 50.3% | 46.2% |
| Max Domi | 49.0% | 49.1% | 42.0% |
| Philipp Kurashev | 49.4% | 49.0% | 38.2% |
47.5% together, 50.3% for him apart and 46.2% for Jones apart. Splitting them up moved neither man. Whatever is driving the share, it is not this pairing.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
125 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 40 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 65% from beyond forty.