Rasmus Dahlin

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

13 goals and 40 assists in 80 games — 53 points at 24:01 a night, minus-22, with 3 power-play goals on 170 shots and 68 penalty minutes.

Twenty-four minutes a night at twenty-two, the 91st percentile among defencemen, with 3:05 of power play — the 94th — and 40 per cent of his points scored on it.

46.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,580 minutes, the 26th percentile. His ice went 57-67 against an expectation of 56.7-65.53 — the scoring landed exactly where the chances said and the goals against did too. Nothing about the minus-22 is luck. It is a description of the minutes.

3.52 miles a game is the 97th percentile among the skaters this book tracks. Nobody in Buffalo covered more ground.

The Finesse Game

129 assists in 277 games before his twenty-third birthday, and he leaves his own zone with the puck rather than passing it away. That is the skill, it has been visible since he was eighteen, and it is why the point totals keep rising on a club that keeps losing.

170 attempts at a median of 54 feet — the 90th percentile for distance — with 9 per cent from inside the slot, off a 97.7 mph shot at the 79th. Thirteen goals off a point shot is a 7.6 per cent conversion at the 87th percentile, and it is the volume from distance rather than any deception that produces them.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 204, and the defending is the part that has not arrived. 2.84 blocks per 60 is the 10th percentile among defencemen and 3.78 hits at the 47th. He is not in front of shots and he does not finish checks, and on 24 minutes a night that shows.

1.03 penalties taken per 60 is the 84th percentile — he fouls when the gap goes, and the gap goes because the top speed is 21.4 mph, the 22nd percentile. He is not fast in a straight line; he is agile, and the tracking cannot see the difference.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2018, 277 games by twenty-two, 160 points, and a minus-78 across all of them.

He is 22, a restricted free agent this summer past, and the most important player in the organisation. Everything Buffalo does for the next five years is built on the assumption that a defenceman who takes 46 per cent of the chances at twenty-two takes 53 per cent at twenty-six — and there is nothing yet in the measured record that either confirms or refutes it.