Quinn Hughes

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

7 goals and 69 assists in 78 games — 76 points — at 25:40 a night. Plus-15, 154 shots at 4.6 per cent, two on the power play, 34 penalty minutes.

The 69 assists are second among the defencemen in this book, behind only Erik Karlsson, and the 76 points are tied for second with Josh Morrissey. It is a career high by eight, in his fifth season, at twenty-three.

25:40 a night is the fourth-most of any skater in this edition, behind Cale Makar, Drew Doughty and Rasmus Dahlin.

And then the row that complicates all of it. 50 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five — the 45th percentile, dead average — across 1,493 minutes, with his ice at 81-61 against an expectation of 58.71-58.62.

Eighty-one goals scored on his ice against fifty-nine expected. That is the third-largest gap in this book, behind Vince Dunn and Jared McCann, and it is twenty-two goals of finishing that the chances did not call for.

He started 52 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 58th percentile: 434 attacking draws against 400 defensive ones. So the deployment was ordinary and the chances came out ordinary too.

The Finesse Game

154 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 77 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 4 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 113 shots on goal and three goals — 2.65 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 33 shots and three goals, 9.09, on the league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: six shots and one goal.

A hundred and thirteen shots on goal from beyond forty feet is an enormous volume, and it returned three goals. 220 tracked attempts, 55 of them slap shots — a 25.0 per cent share — and a shot measured at 93.6 mph, the 68th percentile.

Seven goals in a season and 26 in 283 career games at 4.9 per cent. He is not a shooter and this book’s whole line on point shots applies to him as forcefully as to anybody in it.

The 69 assists are the file, and what they measure is entries. He carries the puck out of his own end, through the neutral zone and over the line under control, and the play starts because he has already skated it into the offensive zone rather than because he found a seam from the point.

That is the rarest thing in the position and it is why 215 career assists sit against 26 goals.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 180 pounds, with 34 penalty minutes in 78 games and 108 in 283 career games.

3.72 miles a game, the 99th percentile — the fourth-most ground covered by any skater in this book — at a top speed of 22.4 mph, the 57th, with 1.1 bursts above twenty a game at the 59th.

Read those three together, because they are the whole athlete. He is not fast in a straight line and he never stops moving. The mileage is edges: turns, pivots, retreats and re-attacks inside a shift, at twenty-five minutes a night.

The edge work is what lets a 180-pound defenceman play a quarter of every game against men who outweigh him by fifty pounds, and no measurement in this project captures it directly.

He is not physical, does not win a battle by force, and does not try. He beats a forechecker by turning away from him before contact, which works until it does not, and the games where it does not are the ones his critics remember.

34 penalty minutes in 78 games is a low total and it comes from a defenceman who is rarely in a position that needs a foul to escape.

The Intangibles

Seventh overall in 2018, five seasons, 283 games, 241 points, all of them here.

26 goals and 215 assists, and a minus-9 across five seasons on a club that has made the playoffs once.

He is twenty-four, on a team that finished twenty-second, and second in points among the defencemen in this book at twenty-three.

The honest summary is two sentences that do not sit comfortably together. He drives the puck up the ice better than almost anyone alive at his position, and the expected goals on his ice came out at exactly fifty per cent. Twenty-two goals of finishing made the season look like a great deal more than that, and Vancouver’s finishing was fourth-best in the league — which is not a thing a club gets to keep.