Marc-Edouard Vlasic

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

1 goal and 17 assists in 78 games — 18 points — at 17:28 a night. Minus-14, 67 shots at 1.5 per cent, 16 penalty minutes.

50 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,146 minutes, the 45th percentile — the best chance share of any San Jose defenceman — with his ice at 45-61 against an expectation of 46.83-46.91. Fourteen goals worse than the chances at the defensive end, on a club whose goaltending was the worst in the league.

He started 35.8 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 8th percentile: 234 attacking draws against 420 defensive ones. At thirty-six, on a club with nothing to protect, he is still the defenceman sent out for the shift that starts in his own end.

The Finesse Game

67 shots at a median of 49 feet, with 60 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 40 shots on goal, no goals. From twenty to forty: 13 shots, no goals. Inside twenty: 10 shots and one goal. The single goal of his season came from close range, and 53 shots on goal from outside twenty feet produced nothing.

A 1.5 per cent shooting percentage against a career 4.8, which is itself among the lowest figures a thousand-game defenceman has ever carried into a book like this one.

114 tracked attempts, 26 of them slap shots — a 22.8 per cent share, which is the second-highest on this blue line and returned exactly nothing from range.

That is now five defencemen across two consecutive chapters whose slap-shot share predicted nothing about their long-range conversion. 93.0 mph at the 64th percentile.

The first pass is the skill and always has been: short, early, to the near winger, with no interest whatever in carrying it.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 205 pounds. 0.3 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 15th percentile, on 2.29 miles a game at the 31st, at a top speed of 22.4 mph at the 56th.

He has one gear left and does not need a second one, because the game is played from position: he takes the inside lane, angles the puck-carrier to the wall, and never chases.

16 penalty minutes in 78 games. 444 penalty minutes in 1,239 career games — the eighth-lowest rate of any defenceman in this book with eight hundred games, and it is the truest single measure of the way he plays — he is almost never beaten badly enough to have to foul.

He blocks shots and defends the front of his net, and at thirty-six that is what is left of a game that was never built on speed.

The Intangibles

Thirty-fifth overall in 2005, the second round, seventeen seasons, 1,239 games, 364 points, all of them in San Jose.

77 goals in seventeen years. He is one of a handful of defencemen in this book with a thousand games, and every one of them was played here.

He is thirty-six on a roster that has just traded Erik Karlsson and is three years into a rebuild. The 45th-percentile chance share out of the 8th percentile of zone starts is a genuinely good season and it is nearly irrelevant to where the club is going.

What the file is for is the record: a defensive defenceman who played seventeen seasons at one address, took 444 penalty minutes doing it, and scored 77 goals.