Noah Dobson

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

13 goals and 36 assists in 78 games — 49 points — at 20:23 a night. Plus-4, 206 shots, five on the power play, 20 penalty minutes.

Forty-nine points from a twenty-three-year-old defenceman, and 1,232 five-on-five minutes.

50.1 per cent of the expected goals, the 53rd percentile, with his ice at 61-48 against an expectation of 55.06-54.74.

And the deployment, because on this club it is never neutral: he started 63.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 95th percentile — 431 attacking draws against 248, while Pelech, Pulock and Mayfield were taking the other end. A 50.1 per cent chance share out of the 95th percentile of zone starts is the honest counterweight to the point total.

Four seasons, 238 games, 121 points.

The Finesse Game

206 shots at a median of 53 feet, 81 per cent of them from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 157 shots on goal and 9 goals — 5.73 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Only Brent Burns, Dougie Hamilton and Roman Josi put more long shots on net in the league.

That is the third blue line in this edition where the point shot pays, and the shot he picks is part of it. 98 slap shots out of 309 tracked attempts — a third of everything he throws — against 176 wrist shots. Across the league that share is worth about a point and a half of long-range conversion, so it is part of the answer and nowhere near all of it.

94.1 mph at the 72nd percentile, on that slap count, so the reading holds.

36 assists and 91 in 238 career games. The first pass and the walk along the blue line are both there, and at twenty-three the offensive half of this file is already a top-pair one.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 200, with 20 penalty minutes in seventy-eight games.

Top speed 21.7 mph, the 21st percentile; 0.7 bursts a game, the 38th; 2.83 miles a game, the 70th.

Heavy mileage at a low top end, which on this blue line is the house profile — but he is twenty-three and the others are not, and a 6-4 defenceman in the bottom quarter of measured speed at that age is the one thing in the file to watch.

He does not play a physical game, does not clear his net front, and is not asked to while Pelech and Romanov are on the roster. Twenty penalty minutes in a full season is what that looks like.

The defending is positional and it is adequate rather than good, which the 95th-percentile zone starts are there to protect.

The Intangibles

Twelfth overall in 2018, and 121 points in 238 games by twenty-three.

The progression reads 7 points, 14, 51 and 49, and the fourth of those came with a full season of top-pair minutes for the first time.

What this club has is a right-handed offensive defenceman entering his prime on a roster whose forwards finished twentieth in chance generation. What it has to decide is whether he can be given the hard end of the rink, because the man playing it now is thirty-one.