Quinn Hughes

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, 8 goals and 60 assists at 25:15 a night, plus-10, twenty-eight penalty minutes, 150 shots. None of the eight came on the power play. Seventh overall in 2018 by Vancouver, four seasons, 205 games, 165 points.

The Finesse Game

Sixty of his sixty-eight points are assists, and forty-six per cent of them came on the power play — the 98th percentile among the 202 defencemen who played forty games, off 3:29 a night, the 6th-most at the position in the league.

25:15 a night is the 9th-largest workload of the 202.

1.34 even-strength points per 60 is the 87th percentile, so the power play is doing a great deal and not all of it.

And the possession columns disagree with each other in a way worth naming. 52.7 per cent of the attempts is the 76th percentile; 50.1 per cent of the expected goals is the 52nd. His ice takes more shots than the other side and no more of the dangerous ones, which is what a defenceman moving the puck up the ice without owning the front of his own net looks like.

57.0 per cent offensive-zone starts is the 125th-highest of the 652 skaters who took two hundred end-zone starts — a soft chair, and it accounts for some of the shot share.

4.69 shots per 60 is the 54th percentile at 5.3 per cent, from a 51-foot median.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 180 pounds. 0.59 hits per 60 is the fewest of all 202 defencemen and 1.75 blocks per 60 is also the fewest of all 202.

Both extremes at once, at twenty-five minutes a night, is a combination nobody else at the position produces. Erik Karlsson is 2nd in hits and 3rd-fewest in blocks; Hughes is 1st in both.

Twenty-eight penalty minutes in seventy-six games.

The Intangibles

8.96 miles per 60 is the 23rd-most of all 202 defencemen and 3.0 bursts over twenty miles an hour per 60 the 85th percentile, at 5-10 and 180 pounds on a 25:15 shift.

A 22.6 mph top speed is the 84th percentile. Fast, frequently at speed, and covering more ground per minute than 179 of the 202 — that is the tracking’s whole account of him, and it agrees with the reputation.

What it cannot measure is the part that matters most for this player: edges, pivots, how he escapes a forecheck, how he retrieves under pressure. Nothing in this book can settle whether the smallest top-pair defenceman in the league is defending well or being defended for.

He is 22, with 165 points in 205 games across four seasons, and the sixty-eight is a career high by fifteen. A twenty-five-minute defenceman producing at that rate at 22 is a genuinely rare asset. A 50th-percentile chance share and the fewest hits and blocks in his cohort are the two things a seven-game series asks about, and the record cannot answer either.