Marcus Pettersson

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

72 games, 2 goals and 17 assists at 15:39 a night, plus-8, thirty-eight penalty minutes, 83 shots. Thirty-eighth overall in 2014 by Anaheim, five seasons, 294 games, 79 points.

The Finesse Game

0.75 giveaways per 60 is the 2nd-fewest of all 202 defencemen who played forty games. Jan Rutta, arriving from Tampa Bay, is 4th-fewest at 0.87.

Pittsburgh’s blue line now holds two of the four most careful defencemen in the league — alongside Jeff Petry, who gave it away more than any of the 202, and Evgeni Malkin, who gave it away more than any of the 393 forwards.

1.05 even-strength points per 60 is the 64th percentile at fifteen minutes a night, which is a real rate for a third-pair workload, and none of his points came on the power play.

4.42 shots per 60 at 2.4 per cent — two goals from eighty-three attempts, the 14th percentile.

Ninety-three per cent of his attempts came from outside the slot at a 53-foot median, and he is 6-5 and 174 pounds — the lightest defenceman in this book six-foot-five or taller, by twenty-one pounds.

55.2 per cent of the expected goals and 53.8 per cent of the attempts, out of 45.8 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 200th-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts. That is the hardest chair of any defenceman who played the season in Pittsburgh, and it produced the second-best share on the blue line.

The Physical Game

6.49 hits per 60 is the 79th percentile at 174 pounds, which is not what the weight predicts, and 3.94 blocks the 46th.

0.59 penalties drawn per 60 against 1.01 taken, the 81st percentile, and thirty-eight penalty minutes came out of seventy-two games. The one soft column.

The Intangibles

21.5 mph is the 29th percentile and 1.0 bursts per 60 the 27th, against 8.72 miles per 60 at the 81st. He covers a lot of ground slowly, which for a 6-5 defenceman playing a defensive chair is the expected shape.

Fifteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds a night is the 12th percentile of the position. That is a third-pair workload attached to top-pair possession numbers, and the gap between those two is the argument of the file.

He is 26 with 294 games and seventy-nine points. The giveaway rate, the reach and the shares out of the hardest chair on the blue line are three real things. The scoring, the shot and the penalties taken are why nobody has yet given him twenty minutes.