Jordan Spence

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

Twenty-four games, two goals and six assists, at 19:45 a night. Even on plus-minus, and two penalty minutes. Ninety-fifth overall in 2019, and this was his first NHL season at 21.

5-11 and 188 pounds, right-handed, born in Manly, Australia. Nineteen forty-five is a second-pair workload and he was handed it as a rookie on a playoff club.

The Finesse Game

Twenty-four games is below every qualifying line the percentile tables use, so this is raw. His ice took 53.7 per cent of the five-on-five expected goals across 409 minutes — third among the club’s defencemen behind Alexander Edler and Drew Doughty. His ice went 15-16 against an expectation of 18.35-15.85.

Forty-one shots at a 54-foot median, seven per cent inside twenty feet, eighty-one per cent from beyond forty. That is a point shot and nothing else yet, at 95.0 mph — a hard one for his size.

Eight points in twenty-four games from a 5-11 defenceman, at 19:45 a night, with two penalty minutes all season.

The pair file is the caution and it is a real one. Beside Olli Määttä across 506 attempts he was at 57.4 per cent; away from Määttä he read 46.1. Määttä alone was at 49.9, so the partnership flattered both, and most of Spence’s season was inside it.

The Physical Game

He is 188 pounds and the record shows it. Two penalty minutes in twenty-four games is remarkable and not entirely a compliment — a defenceman who never fouls is often a defenceman who is not getting close enough to.

56.4 per cent of his end-zone starts came in the attacking end — the softest treatment of any King defenceman who played twenty games, which is how a club protects a small rookie and is exactly what it should have done.

The Intangibles

21.5 mph and 2.84 miles a game put him in the middle of the tracking file — quick enough, working hard enough, and neither is where a small defenceman’s case is made. The case is made in gap control, in edges, in what he does under a forecheck at 188 pounds, and the chips measure none of it.

Twenty-four games is not evidence and this report will not pretend otherwise. What it is, is the profile this book keeps arguing for: a small right-handed defenceman who moved the puck well enough to be handed twenty minutes at 21. The next hundred games decide it, and they are the ones to watch.