Mike Matheson

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

8 goals and 26 assists in 48 games — 34 points — at 24:27 a night, the most on the club. Plus-7, 126 shots, 33 penalty minutes.

Thirty-four points in forty-eight games from a defenceman is a fifty-eight-point pace, and it came on a club that finished twenty-eighth in shot-attempt share.

45.0 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 20th percentile, with his ice at 36-35 against an expectation of 32.00-39.11 — four goals better at the offensive end and four better at the defensive.

He missed thirty-four games, and he has played a full season twice in eight years.

Eight seasons, 465 games, 172 points.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 46 feet, 10 per cent from inside twenty and 67 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 80 shots on goal, 2 goals — 2.50 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen. Inside forty: 45 shots, 6 goals, 13.33 per cent.

Eighty long shots in forty-eight games is one of the highest rates in this book and it produced two goals. Six of his eight came from the third of his volume he took from inside forty.

A hundred and three of his 167 tracked attempts were wrist shots and only twenty-seven were slap shots, which for a defenceman with this shot speed is unusual.

99.6 mph at the 96th percentile — the hardest registered shot of any defenceman in these five chapters. On twenty-seven slap shots, so read the figure with the usual caution.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 196, and 33 penalty minutes.

3.61 miles a game — seventh in the entire league, and every man ahead of him except McDavid is a defenceman. Top speed 22.9 mph, the 81st percentile; bursts 2.2 a game, the 88th.

That is a genuinely exceptional set of skating readings for a twenty-nine-year-old defenceman and it is the whole of what he is: he skates the puck out, he joins the rush, and he covers more ground than almost anybody in the league doing it.

He does not defend by contact. At 196 pounds he gives up the front of his own net, and a 20th-percentile chance share at twenty-four minutes a night is what that costs.

The Intangibles

Twenty-third overall in 2012 to Florida out of Boston College, then Pittsburgh, and then home to Montreal, twenty minutes from where he was born.

47.0 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 33rd percentile.

He is twenty-nine, he plays the most minutes on the club, and the availability is the reservation: 59, 44 and 48 games in three of his last five seasons. When he plays he is the only defenceman here who moves a puck.