Jamie Oleksiak

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 16 assists in 75 games — 25 points — at 19:15 a night. Plus-13, 76 shots at 11.8 per cent, two game-winners, 72 penalty minutes.

Nine goals is a career high by three and an 11.8 per cent shooting percentage is a strange number for a defenceman: the league rate for one from beyond forty feet is 3.17.

51.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,216 minutes, the 60th percentile, with his ice at 58-52 against an expectation of 48.85-45.53.

He started 39.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 11th percentile: 264 attacking draws against 411 defensive ones.

That number is the structure of this club’s blue line and it is worth stating once for the chapter. Seattle started Vince Dunn at the 95th percentile and Adam Larsson at the 94th, and it started Oleksiak at the 11th and Will Borgen at the 11th. The coach split his six defencemen into a pair that starts in the attacking end and a pair that starts in its own, and both halves finished above water.

The Finesse Game

76 shots at a median of 47 feet, and the distribution is the most lopsided reward in this chapter.

Inside twenty feet: eight shots on goal and five goals — 62.50 per cent. From twenty to forty: 25 shots and three goals, 12.00 per cent, above the league rate for defencemen of 8.83. Beyond forty: 41 shots and one goal, 2.44, below the league rate of 3.17.

Five goals from eight shots is not a skill and will not repeat. What is real is where he was standing: a 6-7 defenceman who gets eight shots on goal from inside twenty feet in a season is arriving at the net front on the power play and on the cycle, and at 252 pounds nobody moves him once he is there.

109 tracked attempts, 24 of them slap shots. 99.1 mph at the 95th percentile — the hardest shot on this roster and one of the hardest in the league — and it produced one goal from forty-one shots on goal from the point.

That is one more hard shot from range with nothing to show for it, on a list that is getting long.

The Physical Game

6-7 and 252 pounds — the second-heaviest skater in this book, three pounds behind Nikita Zadorov, and one of five men at 6-7.

Top speed 21.3 mph at the 8th percentile and 0.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game at the 6th. He covers 2.80 miles a night at the 68th percentile, so the ground is covered; it is covered at a size that makes speed irrelevant.

72 penalty minutes in 75 games and 416 in 516 career games. He is punishing and takes the minutes that come with being 252 pounds in front of a net.

He clears the crease. That is the specific job the 11th-percentile deployment implies: the shift starts in his own end, the puck goes behind his net, and he removes whoever followed it there.

He is hard to move in any sense the game has, and there is no forward in the league who wins a battle with him on strength.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2011, eleven seasons, 516 games, 114 points across Dallas, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

34 goals in eleven years and one power-play goal. The career took a long time to start: 78 games in his first four seasons and a spell of being traded twice in two years.

He is thirty, and this was the best season of his career by points, by goals and by plus-minus. On a blue line the coach split in two, he took the defensive half of it and finished plus-six on the goals.

A 6-7 defenceman who can play nineteen minutes against the other club’s best forwards is a rare object, and the eleven seasons it took to become one are the reason he is worth the chapter.