Jamie Drysdale

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

4 goals and 28 assists in 81 games — 32 points at 19:53 a night at nineteen years old, minus-26, on 137 shots and 16 penalty minutes.

Eighty-one games at nearly twenty minutes in a teenager’s second season. Only the club’s injuries explain part of that; the rest is that Anaheim thinks he is the defenceman.

47.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,376 minutes, the 35th percentile. His ice went 52-74 against an expectation of 55.62-60.78 — three and a half goals of scoring missing, and thirteen more conceded than the chances predicted, which is not him and is worth saying plainly: that gap is the goaltending behind him.

The number that matters is who he played it with. Beside Hampus Lindholm he took 49.5 per cent of the expected goals across 1,681 attempts. Apart from Lindholm, across 876, he took 44.8. Lindholm has gone to Boston, and Urho Vaakanainen — who came back in the deal — is not a replacement for him. There is nobody on this roster who does what he did.

The Finesse Game

137 attempts at a median of 47 feet, 65 per cent from beyond 40 and 12 per cent from inside 20, converting at 2.92 per cent. Four goals in 81 games from the 65th percentile of shot velocity is a shot that arrives without threatening anything, and at twenty it is the least interesting thing about him.

38 per cent of his points came on the power play, the 88th percentile, and he took 2:06 a night of it. He beats a forecheck by skating out of it rather than by passing out of it, which on a club with no forwards to receive the pass is both the right answer and a habit that will need unlearning somewhere better.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 185, and the two figures that describe how he defends are 1.49 hits per 60, the 6th percentile, and 2.68 blocks per 60, the 4th percentile among defencemen. He does not block shots and he does not finish checks. He defends with feet and stick, and when that fails there is no second method.

The skating is the whole asset and the measurements are emphatic: 23.0 mph top end, the 96th percentile among the league’s defencemen, and 5.6 bursts above 20 mph per 60, the 99th. Nobody at his position accelerated to speed more often.

What the tracking chips carry is straight-line speed and ground covered. The edges, the pivots and the gap control — which is most of what the word means for a defenceman this size — are not measured anywhere in this book and have to be watched for.

The Intangibles

Sixth overall in 2020, 105 NHL games before his twenty-first birthday, and 40 points of them.

He turns 21 in April. A 5-11 defenceman who skates like this either becomes a player the puck runs through or he becomes a matchup problem somebody exploits nightly, and 2022-23 is the season that starts answering it — because the partner who was hiding the difference is in Boston, and what Anaheim finds out this year it will find out the hard way.