Nick Leddy

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

2 goals and 21 assists in 78 games — 23 points — at 21:07 a night. Plus-4, 79 shots at 2.5 per cent, 20 penalty minutes, no power-play points.

A plus-4 on a club that finished twenty-third is the only positive figure among St. Louis’s four most-used defencemen.

45.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,469 minutes, the 19th percentile, with his ice at 65-68 against an expectation of 54.23-64.31 — eleven goals better than the chances at the good end and four worse at the other.

He started 39.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 12th percentile: 306 attacking draws against 468 defensive ones. He and Colton Parayko took the defensive half of this club’s blue line between them, and 1,469 minutes of it is the twenty-second-largest workload in the edition.

The Finesse Game

79 shots at a median of 46 feet, with 55 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 4 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 44 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: 29 shots and two goals, 6.90 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 8.83. Inside twenty: five shots and none.

Seventy-eight shots on goal and two goals. A 2.5 per cent shooting percentage against a career 5.5 across 929 games.

118 tracked attempts, 78 of them wrist shots and only 23 slap — a 19.5 per cent share, low for a defenceman. 87.9 mph at the 29th percentile, which is a genuinely soft shot for the position and is the reason the point shot has never been part of the file.

The 21 assists are the offensive contribution and they come from the first pass. He moves the puck out under pressure and does not carry it.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 205 pounds. Top speed 22.1 mph at the 41st percentile, 1.0 bursts above twenty a game at the 56th, 2.79 miles a game at the 67th.

An ordinary tracking line at thirty-two, from a defenceman whose reputation was built on skating. The feet are still adequate and are no longer the thing they were.

20 penalty minutes in 78 games and 187 in 929 career games — the second-lowest rate of any defenceman in this book with eight hundred games, behind only Jared Spurgeon, and it is the truest single description of the way he plays: he does not engage and is rarely beaten badly enough to have to.

He defends with position and stick, and at 205 pounds against a heavy cycle he gives up ground rather than contesting it.

The Intangibles

Sixteenth overall in 2009, thirteen seasons, 929 games, 383 points across Chicago, the Islanders, Detroit and St. Louis, and two Stanley Cups in Chicago.

70 goals and 313 assists. The peak is seven seasons on Long Island averaging 35 points, and the last four have produced 21, 31, 24 and 23.

He is thirty-two, playing twenty-one minutes a night with the hardest starts on a rebuilding club. That is a real job and it is not one a club gives to a player it thinks is finished.

A minus-56 for a career on four clubs, three of which were bad for most of his time on them.