Nate Schmidt

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

7 goals and 12 assists in 71 games — 19 points — at 18:28 a night. Plus-15, 101 shots at 6.9 per cent, three on the power play, 8 penalty minutes.

Eight penalty minutes in seventy-one games is the lowest total of any defenceman in this chapter and one of the lowest in the book.

52.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,104 minutes, the 65th percentile, with his ice at 36-24 against an expectation of 46.83-42.54.

Stop on that row, because it is the strangest in this chapter. Eleven fewer goals were scored on his ice than the chances called for, and nineteen fewer were allowed — a thirty-goal divergence from expectation in eleven hundred minutes, in both directions at once. The plus-15 is entirely the second half of it and none of it is a skill.

He started 55.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 75th percentile.

The Finesse Game

101 shots at a median of 45 feet, with 61 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 5 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 54 shots on goal and three goals — 5.56 per cent, well above the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 26 shots and three goals, 11.54 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: eight shots and one goal.

157 tracked attempts, 47 of them slap shots — a 29.9 per cent share — and a shot measured at 97.6 mph, the 90th percentile.

45 goals and 161 assists in 598 career games at 5.3 per cent, which is a decent rate for a defenceman and comes almost entirely from range.

He walks the line and finds a shooting lane, which is what a third-pair defenceman with 161 career assists spends his power-play time doing.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 197 pounds, with 8 penalty minutes in 71 games and 106 in 598 career games — about a sixth of a penalty minute a game across ten seasons, which is remarkable for a defenceman.

A top speed of 23.2 mph, the 91st percentile, with 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 33rd and 2.62 miles a game at the 54th.

He is genuinely fast, which at 197 pounds is the whole of the defensive method.

He defends with his feet and his gap and almost never with contact, and eight penalty minutes in a season is that sentence stated as a number.

He is not physical, does not clear his crease, and does not win a battle in front of his own net. On a pairing that is somebody else’s job and Winnipeg has men who do it.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, ten seasons, 598 games, 206 points across Washington, Vegas, Vancouver and Winnipeg.

45 goals and 161 assists, and a plus-92.

He is thirty-two, and he came out of college unselected to play six hundred NHL games.

A plus-92 across ten seasons from a third-pair defenceman is a number worth pausing on, and it is mostly a description of the clubs he has played for rather than of him. What the file contains is speed, discipline and a decade of being useful without ever being the reason a club wins.