Neal Pionk

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

10 goals and 23 assists in 82 games — 33 points — at 21:56 a night. Minus-12, 142 shots at 7.0 per cent, one on the power play, 44 penalty minutes.

10 goals is a career high by four, and 82 games is the first complete season of his career.

49 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 35th percentile — the lowest of any defenceman on this roster who played a thousand minutes — across 1,473 minutes, with his ice at 57-65 against an expectation of 61.63-64.22. Five fewer goals scored than the chances called for.

He started 50.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 46th percentile: 436 attacking draws against 434 defensive ones. Dead even, so none of the 35th percentile is deployment.

The Finesse Game

142 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 66 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 6 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 90 shots on goal and five 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: 11 shots and two goals.

215 tracked attempts, 64 of them slap shots — a 29.8 per cent share — and a shot measured at 93.7 mph, the 69th percentile.

So Winnipeg’s top four contains three defencemen who all beat the positional rate from the point last season — Josh Morrissey at 6.31, Pionk at 5.56, Nate Schmidt at 5.56 — and one who scored nothing at all from there. When four men on one blue line spread that widely, the spread is the finding.

29 goals and 155 assists in 385 career games. The passing is the file, and 155 assists in 385 games from an undrafted defenceman is a genuinely high rate.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 190 pounds, with 44 penalty minutes in 82 games and 189 in 385 career games.

3.10 miles a game at the 85th percentile, at a top speed of 21.7 mph, the 20th, with 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 16th.

A great deal of ground covered without ever being quick — the same shape this book has found on nearly every twenty-minute defenceman in the edition, and it means edges rather than speed.

He is physical for 190 pounds and takes the penalties that come with it, and 44 minutes from a defenceman this size is a high figure.

He joins the rush and is caught behind it, which is the standing objection and the one the 35th-percentile chance share supports.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, six seasons, 385 games, 184 points across the Rangers and Winnipeg.

29 goals and 155 assists, and a minus-8.

He is twenty-eight, and he was never drafted at all before playing nearly four hundred NHL games at twenty-two minutes a night.

An undrafted defenceman with a hundred and fifty-five assists is a better career than most first-round picks get. The chance share is the honest caution: the offence is real and the shift is not always.