Kevin Shattenkirk

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

8 goals and 27 assists in 82 games — 35 points at 21:25 a night, minus-9, with 1 power-play goal on 163 shots and 36 penalty minutes.

All 82 games at thirty-three, in every situation: 1:59 of power play and 2:13 shorthanded. Anaheim used him as a top-four defenceman for a full season.

46.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,399 minutes, the 25th percentile. His ice went 53-65 against an expectation of 53.16-60.84 — the scoring landed exactly where the chances said it would, and four more went in behind him than they predicted.

The with-and-without is the report. Across his six most-used partnerships, his own share in the minutes away from that partner comes out between 45.0 and 47.3 per cent every time — 45.5 apart from Simon Benoit, 45.6 apart from Trevor Zegras, 45.7 apart from Troy Terry, 45.0 apart from Cam Fowler. Zegras was 53.8 without him, Terry 52.6, Sonny Milano 53.4. A number that stable is not a sample problem.

The Finesse Game

163 attempts at a median of 43 feet, and 18 per cent of them from inside the slot, the 91st percentile for a defenceman — he still walks the line and finds a lane rather than firing into shins. 40 per cent of his points came on the power play, the 92nd percentile.

1.30 takeaways per 60 is the 79th percentile among defencemen and the puck still leaves his stick quickly. 340 career assists is a genuine puck-mover’s record and the hands have not gone. The problem is not what he does with it.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 203, 2.49 hits per 60 at the 26th percentile, 4.61 blocks at the 64th. He was never physical and is not pretending to be now.

The skating has gone, and the tracking says so bluntly: 21.3 mph top speed at the 17th percentile, 8.18 miles per sixty at the 21st, and 0.3 bursts above 20 mph per 60 — the 2nd percentile among the league’s defencemen. Across a full 82-game season that is a handful of moments above twenty miles an hour in total. That is what a forechecker sees, and it is why the retrievals go wrong before the passing ever gets a chance.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2007, 816 games, 433 points, and a Stanley Cup with Tampa Bay in 2020 in the one season he spent there.

He turns 34 in January, in the last year of his contract, on a club with a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-four-year-old who need the minutes. The honest use of him is 18 minutes on a second pair and the March trade that follows, and the honest reading of last season is that Anaheim gave him 21:25 because it had no one else and paid for it every night.