Kris Letang

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, 10 goals and 58 assists at 25:47 a night, plus-20, forty-nine penalty minutes, 214 shots. That ice time is the 4th-heaviest of the 202 defencemen who played forty games, and fifty-eight assists is tied for the 5th-most of any defenceman in this book. Sixteen seasons, 941 games, 650 points and a career plus-100, all of it for one club.

The Finesse Game

1.69 even-strength points per 60 is the 8th-best of the 202 defencemen who played forty games. At 35, on the 3rd-heaviest workload of his sixteen seasons — he has been above twenty-five minutes a night in seven of the last nine.

6.39 shots per 60 is the 88th percentile and the geography is unusual for a man who plays the point: seventeen per cent from the slot is the 87th percentile and a 47-foot median is the 17th. He shoots from closer than eighty-three per cent of the position.

Three minutes and twenty-nine seconds of power play a night is the 98th percentile and thirty-two per cent of his points came there.

1.76 takeaways per 60 is the 93rd percentile against 2.36 giveaways at the 83rd — a heavy two-way ledger from a man handling the puck constantly.

51.8 per cent of the expected goals and 51.1 per cent of the attempts, out of 54.3 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 199th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts.

The pair file says who he played with. With Sidney Crosby across 1,284 attempts the two took 56.4 per cent of the expected goals; apart from Crosby, Letang is at 47.8 across 1,649. With Jeff Carter it is 43.0 per cent. That is an eight-and-a-half-point swing between his best and worst regular combination.

The Physical Game

5.10 hits per 60 is the 64th percentile and 3.64 blocks the 33rd at 6-0 and 199 pounds. 0.36 penalties drawn per 60 against 0.69 taken, and forty-nine penalty minutes came out of seventy-eight games.

The Intangibles

8.93 miles per 60 is the 14th-most of the 192 defencemen the tracking covers, at 35 years old.

The 22.5 mph top speed is the 82nd percentile and 1.6 bursts per 60 only the 53rd. Distance, not pace — which at twenty-six minutes a night in a sixteenth season is a remarkable thing for the chips to be recording.

He is 35 with 941 games and 650 points. The point rate, the workload and the ground covered are three top-of-the-position figures in the same season, and the number underneath them is a 51.8 per cent expected-goal share on a club that took 53.5 per cent of the chances.