Nick Jensen

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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

76 games, 5 goals and 16 assists at 19:21 a night, plus-32 — the best figure on the club by seven — twenty-one penalty minutes, 88 shots and one game-winner. Hundred-and-fiftieth overall in 2009 by Detroit — the fifth round — six seasons, 407 games, 91 points.

The Finesse Game

3.59 shots per 60 is the 27th percentile at 5.7 per cent, from a 52-foot median with eight per cent of his attempts from inside twenty feet.

0.99 even-strength points per 60 is the 57th percentile and none of his twenty-one points came on the power play — none in 407 career games.

51.0 per cent of the expected goals is the 59th percentile and 50.0 per cent of the attempts the 51st, out of 39.0 per cent offensive-zone starts, the 73rd-lowest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts. Two hundred and eighty-one attacking-zone shifts against 440.

And then the ledger, which is the file. His ice went 64-37 against an expectation of 48.77-46.85. Fifteen goals better than the model in front and ten fewer against — a combined margin of twenty-five goals, the 9th-largest of the 644 skaters in this edition who played four hundred five-on-five minutes.

A fifth-round pick playing nineteen minutes out of the club’s hardest defensive chair produced the ninth-best on-ice margin in the league.

With Dmitry Orlov he took 52.8 per cent of the attempts across 1,607 and 46.4 per cent apart from him, which is the honest qualification: the pair is a great deal better than he is without it.

The Physical Game

0.857 penalties drawn per 60 against 0.367 taken is a net of plus 0.490 — the best of all 202 defencemen who played forty games.

2:32 a night short-handed is the 80th percentile among defencemen, out of 39.0 per cent offensive-zone starts.

5.51 hits per 60 is the 70th percentile and 3.75 blocks the 37th, at 6-0 and 202 pounds, and twenty-one penalty minutes came out of seventy-six games.

The Intangibles

9.034 miles per 60 is the 8th-most of the 192 tracked defencemen and 3.673 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 the 14th-most, against a 22.5 mph top speed at the 78th percentile.

He covers more ground and sprints more often than almost every defenceman in the league, out of the hardest chair on his own club. That is the mechanism the goal ledger above is describing, as far as the record can see it.

He is 32, a fifth-round pick, with ninety-one points in 407 games. The penalty differential is a league lead and the on-ice margin is inside the top ten in hockey. Neither of them is the sort of number that survives being separated from Dmitry Orlov, and the record cannot say how much of it would.