Nathan Walker

Last Season

Four goals and seven assists in 46 games — 11 points, minus-nine, at 11:59 a night with 28 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

Fifty-nine unblocked attempts, four goals, median 21 feet with 47 per cent from inside twenty. The location is right and the volume is a fourth-liner’s.

Sixty-seven points in 275 career games. Seven assists in 46 games is the honest rate.

The Physical Game

Five foot nine and 191 pounds, and thick for the height — he forechecks hard, finishes checks well above his weight, and gets to the front of the net. Twenty-eight penalty minutes.

He has spent a career being the smallest man on the ice and playing as though he had not noticed.

The Intangibles

Forty-seven point seven per cent of the expected goals, 33rd percentile, and 45.1 per cent of the shot attempts, 12th, across 500 minutes.

That is a middling fourth-line season, which is all the role asks.

Two points in his last ten. He is 32, a third-round pick, and the first player developed in Australia to reach the National Hockey League — 275 games into a career that was not supposed to happen at all.