John Carlson

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

78 games, 17 goals and 54 assists at 23:49 a night, plus-13, twenty penalty minutes, 195 shots, seven power-play goals and two game-winners. Twenty-seventh overall in 2008 by Washington, thirteen seasons, 887 games, 593 points.

The Finesse Game

Fifty-four assists and 1.827 even-strength points per 60, the 4th-highest of all 202 defencemen who played forty games, and 461 assists in 887 career games.

3:59 a night on the power play is the most of all 202, and thirty-five per cent of his seventy-one points came there.

6.30 shots per 60 is the 87th percentile at 8.7 per cent — the 94th — from a 48-foot median with seventy-one per cent of his attempts from beyond forty feet. His shot is 99.2 mph, the 25th-hardest of the 192 tracked defencemen.

Seventeen goals from a point shot at 8.7 per cent is the number that will not repeat, and it is worth saying so before the rest of the file: his career figure is 132 goals from 2,053 shots, which is 6.4 per cent.

49.9 per cent of the expected goals is the 51st percentile and 50.6 per cent of the attempts the 58th, out of 58.5 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 86th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.

His ice went 57-55 against an expectation of 55.26-55.56 — level at both ends, which for a man playing twenty-four minutes out of a soft chair is the honest verdict on the season.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 220 pounds, and twenty penalty minutes in seventy-eight games — 0.29 penalties taken per 60 is the 10th percentile, which is to say almost nobody at the position takes fewer.

2.36 hits per 60 is the 47th-fewest of the 202 and 3.62 blocks per 60 the 31st percentile, against 1:43 a night short-handed.

The Intangibles

21.0 mph is the 16th-slowest top speed of the 192 tracked defencemen, with 0.9 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 at the 25th percentile and 8.24 miles per 60 at the 27th.

All three are in the bottom third of the position and he plays 23:49 a night. That is a club deciding, correctly, that what he does with the puck is worth more than what his legs cost.

He is 32, twenty-seventh overall in 2008, with 593 points in 887 games and a career plus-100. The passing, the power play and the shot are the best of their kind on this roster and among the best at the position in the league. The seventeen goals are borrowed against next season, and the tracking is the reason to be careful about the one after.