Nicolas Hague

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

3 goals and 14 assists in 81 games — 17 points — at 18:05 a night. Plus-7, 103 shots at 2.9 per cent, 51 penalty minutes.

Eighty-one games, in his fourth season, at twenty-four.

49.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,385 minutes — the second-most on this roster — with his ice at 58-54 against an expectation of 55.07-56.71.

He started 49.7 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 44th percentile: 390 attacking draws against 395 defensive ones. Dead even, and a dead-even chance share out of it.

The Finesse Game

103 shots at a median of 52 feet, with 79 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 3 per cent from inside twenty — the most extreme distance profile on this blue line.

Beyond forty feet: 74 shots on goal and no goals. From twenty to forty: 21 shots and three goals, 14.29 per cent, above the league rate for defencemen of 8.83. Inside twenty: four shots and none.

Seventy-four shots on goal from beyond forty feet and nothing at all, on 48 slap shots out of 158 attempts — a 30.4 per cent share, the highest on this blue line — and a shot measured at 99.1 mph, the 95th percentile.

13 goals in 223 career games at 3.7 per cent. All three of last season’s came from the mid-slot.

The point shot is his only offensive act and it has never produced anything, which is a sentence that could be written about a great many defencemen in this book and is unusually literal here.

The Physical Game

6-6 and 245 pounds — one of the four heaviest skaters in this book — with 51 penalty minutes in 81 games and 152 in 223 career games.

Top speed 21.6 mph at the 19th percentile, 0.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 13th, 2.57 miles a game at the 49th. Slow, and covering ordinary ground for eighteen minutes a night.

He clears the front of his net and nobody in the league moves him out of it, which at that size is the reason he plays.

He is punishing along the wall, and at 245 pounds the check does not need to be well-timed to end the play.

The skating is the ceiling and everybody has always known it. He is beaten wide, he cannot recover, and eighteen minutes on a third pair is the honest projection.

The Intangibles

Thirty-fourth overall in 2017, the second round, four seasons, 223 games, 59 points, all of them here, and a Stanley Cup at twenty-four.

13 goals and 46 assists, and a plus-27.

He is twenty-four, the youngest defenceman on the roster by two years, and has already played two hundred games.

What the file has is size that cannot be taught and feet that cannot be fixed. A 44th-percentile chance share out of even starts at eighteen minutes is a perfectly respectable third-pair season, and it is probably close to the whole of what he becomes.