Jakob Chychrun

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

9 goals and 24 assists in 48 games — 33 points — split between Arizona and Ottawa, at 22:42 a night. Plus-7, 144 shots, four on the power play, 30 penalty minutes.

Thirty-three points in forty-eight games is a sixty-point rate from a defenceman, and the plus-7 is his first positive season in seven.

49.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 53rd percentile, with his ice at 45-37 against an expectation of 37.54-38.2 across 880 minutes — seven and a half goals better than the chances at the attacking end.

He started 53 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 63rd percentile.

Seven seasons, 385 games, 175 points, a career minus-39.

The Finesse Game

144 shots at a median of 45 feet, and nine goals.

Beyond forty feet: 73 shots on goal and 1 goal — 1.37 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 50 shots and 6 goals, 12.00 per cent, against a positional rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: 16 shots and 2 goals.

The goals come from inside the blue line and the seventy-three from beyond it produced one, which is the second-worst high-volume long-range season in this batch after Trouba’s.

130 wrist shots and 34 slap out of 205 tracked attempts. 97.3 mph at the 89th percentile, on that slap count, so the shot is genuinely hard — and it has gone in once from range in a season.

113 career assists against 62 goals. The walk from the point and the pass down the wall are what the club is paying for.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 215, with 30 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.4 mph, the 56th percentile; 1.3 bursts a game, the 66th; 3.19 miles a game, the 90th.

Heavy mileage at ordinary speed, in twenty-three minutes a night — the same shape as Chabot’s beside him and slightly less extreme.

He closes gaps with his feet and finishes checks when they are there, and at 215 pounds he is not moved off the front of his own net.

What the record has instead of a defensive verdict is a career minus-39 assembled almost entirely in Arizona, which is a club rather than an argument. The plus-7 is the first season in which the two are separable.

The Intangibles

Sixteenth overall in 2016 to Arizona, six and a half seasons there, and a deadline trade at twenty-four.

62 goals and 113 assists in 385 games, on a body that has played 68, 50, 53, 63, 56, 47 and 48 games in seven seasons — never once a full schedule.

He is twenty-five and the offensive half of the file is a genuine top-pair one. The whole projection is the availability: a defenceman who has never played seventy games is being asked to play twenty-three minutes a night on a club with no depth behind him.