John Carlson

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 20 assists in 40 games — 29 points — at 23:23 a night. Minus-7, 124 shots at 7.3 per cent, three on the power play, one shorthanded, 12 penalty minutes.

Forty games, ended by a puck to the head in December and a fractured skull.

50.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 681 minutes, the 50th percentile, with his ice at 32-34 against an expectation of 33.40-32.88.

He started 62.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 94th percentile: 300 attacking draws against 179 defensive ones. The softest deployment of any defenceman on this roster, and a dead-even chance share out of it.

29 points in 40 games is a sixty-point rate, which is what he has been for six years.

The Finesse Game

124 shots at a median of 46 feet, with 63 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 78 shots on goal and four goals — 5.13 per cent, well above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 27 shots and four goals, 14.81 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: 12 shots and one goal.

193 tracked attempts in forty games, 78 of them slap shots — a 40.4 per cent share, the seventh-highest of the 153 defencemen in this book who took a hundred attempts — and a shot measured at 99.4 mph, the 95th percentile.

So this is the profile the old argument describes exactly, and this time the numbers came out on its side: four goals from seventy-eight long shots is six-tenths above the rate, which across a season is worth about a goal and a half.

A goal and a half is what this book has found the point shot to be worth when it works at all, and Carlson is the best case for it on the strongest volume, in half a season.

141 goals and 481 assists in 927 career games. The power-play quarterback job has been his for a decade and the 481 assists are the record of it.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 220 pounds, with 12 penalty minutes in 40 games and 302 in 927 career games.

3.20 miles a game at the 91st percentile, at a top speed of 21.2 mph — the 7th percentile — with 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 17th.

That is the sharpest version in this book of a shape it keeps finding: enormous ground covered by a man in the bottom tenth of the league for top speed. He never goes fast and he never stops, at twenty-three minutes a night.

He is not a physical defenceman and does not clear his crease, and at 220 pounds that is a choice the club has accepted for fourteen years.

He defends by keeping his stick in the lane and his gap honest, and the twelve penalty minutes in forty games say it works often enough.

The injury is the thing to watch. A fractured skull is not a soft-tissue problem, and there is no data in this project that can say what a thirty-three-year-old defenceman looks like afterwards.

The Intangibles

Twenty-seventh overall in 2008, fourteen seasons, 927 games, 622 points, all of them here, a Stanley Cup, and a 75-point season in 2019-20.

141 goals and 481 assists, and a plus-93.

He is thirty-three, on a long contract, and has played all nine hundred and twenty-seven of his NHL games for this club.

Six hundred and twenty-two points from a defenceman is a Hall-of-Fame conversation and forty games is not a season. The file is unchanged and unresolved: everything he did last year was at his own level, and there were only forty games of it.