Kris Letang

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

12 goals and 29 assists in 64 games — 41 points — at 24:51 a night. Minus-13, 161 shots at 7.5 per cent, six on the power play, one shorthanded, 30 penalty minutes.

53.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,239 minutes, the 76th percentile, with his ice at 52-54 against an expectation of 63.03-54.33. Eleven goals short at the good end and almost exactly on the number at the other, which is the club’s whole season in one line.

He started 54.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 68th percentile.

Sixty-four games. He has played seventy or more in six of seventeen seasons.

The Finesse Game

161 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 71 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

From beyond forty feet: 109 shots on goal and three goals — 2.75 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty he was six from 24, at 25.00 per cent. Inside twenty, three from 19.

So the twelve goals came almost entirely from the two bands where he took a fifth of his shots. Nine of them from inside forty feet, on 43 shots on goal; three from 109 attempts from the point.

And the slap shot did not rescue it. He slaps 74 of his 225 tracked attempts, 32.9 per cent, which is a point above Erik Karlsson’s share on the same blue line. Karlsson converted at 9.45 from beyond forty and Letang at 2.75. Two right-shot defencemen, the same distance, the same proportion of slap shots, and a rate three and a half times apart.

That comparison is the most useful thing on this page, because it is the cleanest available demonstration that the shot type is not what makes the point shot pay. Whatever separates them — the walk, the traffic, the timing — this book cannot see it.

94.7 mph, the 76th percentile.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 199 pounds, and 3.70 miles a game, the fifth-highest of the 575 skaters in this edition with forty games — behind Dahlin, McDavid, Chabot and Quinn Hughes, and at thirty-six.

Top speed 21.8 mph, the 26th percentile, with 0.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 26th. That combination — enormous ground covered from a modest top end — is the ordinary shape of a first-pair defenceman’s tracking line rather than a verdict on him, and it is the shape he has always had.

30 penalty minutes in 64 games, against a career 691 in 1,005. The edge has come off the game and the minutes have not.

He defends with his feet: gaps closed early, angles taken, very little contact. At 199 pounds against the league’s heavy forwards that has always been a trade rather than a strength.

The Intangibles

Sixty-second overall in 2005, the third round, seventeen seasons, 1,005 games, 691 points, all of them here.

The medical file is the file. Seventeen seasons and 1,005 games, and he has never once come back to a reduced role after missing time: 24:51 a night last season is half a minute above a career average of 24:13.

156 goals and 535 assists from a defenceman who has been the club’s first pair since 2010. What the numbers above describe is a thirty-six-year-old whose legs are intact and whose shot has stopped going in, which is a survivable combination when the club can put a second defenceman beside him.

Pittsburgh has now done that. Whether Letang or Karlsson is the one who moves to the second pair is the interesting question of the season.