Nick Jensen

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

5 goals and 24 assists in 77 games — 29 points — at 20:37 a night. Minus-1, 109 shots at 4.6 per cent, 18 penalty minutes.

29 points is a career high by eight, in his seventh season, at thirty-two.

50 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,367 minutes — the most of any player on this roster — with his ice at 51-56 against an expectation of 57.75-57.69. Seven fewer goals scored than the chances called for, and the goals against came out exactly where they should have.

He started 39 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 11th percentile: 324 attacking draws against 506 defensive ones — and 506 is tied for the fifth-most in this book.

A dead-even chance share out of the eleventh percentile of starts, on a club that finished twentieth in chances, is the best thing any Washington defenceman did last season.

The Finesse Game

109 shots at a median of 46 feet, with 60 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 66 shots on goal and one goal — 1.52 per cent, less than half the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 29 shots and two goals, 6.90 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: 11 shots and two goals.

161 tracked attempts, 35 of them slap shots — a 21.7 per cent share — and a shot measured at 95.2 mph, the 79th percentile. Sixty-six long shots on goal for one goal.

18 goals in 484 career games at 3.1 per cent. There is nothing here and there is not meant to be.

The 24 assists come from moving the puck out of the zone quickly rather than from anything he does in the offensive end, and 102 career assists against 18 goals says so.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 202 pounds, with 18 penalty minutes in 77 games and 126 in 484 career games — a very low rate for a defenceman taking these starts.

A top speed of 23.1 mph, the 89th percentile, and 3.07 miles a game at the 83rd, with 1.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 62nd.

That is by far the best tracking line of any defenceman in this chapter, and it is the mechanism: a defenceman who takes five hundred defensive-zone draws and gets out of his own end has to be able to skate, and he can.

He defends with his feet and his gap rather than with contact, which the eighteen penalty minutes record from the other side.

He is not punishing and does not clear his crease by force, and at 202 pounds against the men who stand in front of nets that is somebody else’s job.

The Intangibles

A hundred and fiftieth overall in 2009, the fifth round, seven seasons, 484 games, 120 points across Detroit and Washington.

18 goals and 102 assists, and a plus-26.

He is thirty-three, and he did not play an NHL game until he was twenty-six.

A fifth-round pick who did not play an NHL game until he was twenty-six and has now played nearly five hundred of them, taking the eleventh percentile of starts on his own club, is a career built entirely out of skating and willingness. The 29 points are incidental. The 506 defensive draws are the file.