Mario Ferraro

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

4 goals and 7 assists in 72 games — 11 points — at 21:36 a night. Minus-31, 66 shots at 6.1 per cent, 24 penalty minutes, no power-play points.

21:36 is the most ice time of any San Jose skater who was still on the roster at the end of the summer.

45.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,281 minutes, the 18th percentile, with his ice at 42-72 against an expectation of 49.35-59.11. Thirteen goals worse than the chances at the defensive end and seven worse at the other, which is a twenty-goal gap with both halves running against him.

He started 45.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 29th percentile.

The honest reading of a minus-31 here has three parts: a bad club, a defensive assignment, and the worst goaltending in the league behind him. It does not have a fourth part that lets him off entirely — an 18th-percentile chance share over 1,281 minutes is his own record.

The Finesse Game

66 shots at a median of 47 feet, with 59 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 35 shots on goal and two goals — 5.71 per cent, above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 17 shots and one goal. Inside twenty: 13 shots and one goal.

On 65 shots on goal that distribution says nothing except that he shoots very little: four goals and seven assists in 72 games at nearly twenty-two minutes a night is one of the smallest offensive returns on that much ice in this edition.

95 tracked attempts is the seventh-lowest count of the 91 defencemen in the league who played twenty minutes a night. Fifteen of them are slap shots.

98.3 mph at the 93rd percentile. The shot is genuinely hard and he almost never uses it, which is a choice rather than an oversight: he is a defenceman who moves the puck up and goes back to his post.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 200 pounds, and 2.92 miles a game at the 75th percentile at a top speed of 22.8 mph, the 78th, with 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 30th.

Good feet and real mileage, from a defenceman who is short for the job and plays it against the other team’s best line every night.

He defends by getting there first and finishing the check, which at 5-11 against top lines is the only method available and is why he plays twenty-two minutes on a club with no other option.

24 penalty minutes in 72 games and 92 in 252 career games. He is punishing for his size and takes very few penalties doing it, which is the most impressive pairing in this file.

The Intangibles

Forty-ninth overall in 2017, the second round, four seasons, 252 games, 53 points, all of them here.

A minus-57 for a career and nine goals in four years. Neither number should be read as a verdict: he has played every one of those seasons on a club that has finished in the bottom third, and has been its most-used defenceman for three of them.

He is twenty-five, which is the age at which a defenceman’s record starts to be his own rather than his team’s. What is not in doubt is the workload. A 5-11 defenceman who plays 21:36 against first lines on a rebuilding club is being asked to do something no coach would ask if there were another answer.

The next two seasons will say whether he is a top-four defenceman being buried or a third-pair defenceman being over-used, and this book cannot tell them apart yet.