Matt Benning

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 23 assists in 77 games — 24 points — at 19:47 a night. Minus-18, 58 shots at 1.7 per cent, 26 penalty minutes, no power-play points.

24 points is a career high by three, and 23 assists is a career high by eight.

45.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,246 minutes, the 20th percentile, with his ice at 46-58 against an expectation of 43.83-51.70.

He started 29.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone. That is the 3rd percentile, and the sixteenth-lowest share of the 525 skaters in this book: 202 attacking draws against 486 defensive ones. Every one of the fifteen men below him is a forward. No defenceman in this book was sent out in worse circumstances more often, and Benning played twenty minutes a night doing it.

That is the number to keep from this file. A minus-18 out of the hardest deployment given to any defenceman in this book, on the club with the worst goaltending in the league, is a better season than the counting line suggests.

The Finesse Game

58 shots at a median of 48 feet, with 64 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 2 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 37 shots on goal and one goal, 2.70 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 19 shots and none. Inside twenty: two shots and none.

One goal from fifty-eight shots, and a 1.7 per cent shooting percentage against a career 3.6.

87 tracked attempts, 57 of them wrist shots and 14 slap. 96.5 mph at the 86th percentile — a hard shot he takes eighty-seven times a season.

The 23 assists are the interesting number. A defenceman who starts three shifts in ten in the attacking zone and still records 23 assists is moving the puck out cleanly, and that is the whole of his offensive contribution: the first pass, and nothing after it.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 220 pounds. Top speed 22.1 mph at the 40th percentile, 0.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 25th, 2.77 miles a game at the 66th.

A heavy defenceman with ordinary feet, covering a normal amount of ground for twenty minutes a night. There is nothing in the tracking that stands out and nothing that explains the deployment except that the coach trusted him with it.

He defends with weight: he takes the body at the net front and in the corners, and at 220 pounds the men he is defending do not get to the second chance.

26 penalty minutes in 77 games and 221 in 443 career games — half a minute a game, which for a defenceman who plays this way says the contact is well-timed rather than desperate.

The Intangibles

A hundred and seventy-fifth overall in 2012, the sixth round, seven seasons, 443 games, 100 points across Edmonton, Nashville and San Jose.

17 goals in seven years, and 83 assists. The career has been a third-pair defenceman’s until this season, when a rebuilding club gave him twenty minutes a night and the hardest starts in the league and he did not visibly fall over.

He is twenty-nine. What the file says is that a sixth-round pick has made himself into a second-pair defenceman by being useful in the half of the rink nobody wants, and that the counting line will never show it.