Rasmus Sandin

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 28 assists in 71 games — 35 points — at 19:19 a night between Toronto and Washington. Plus-3, 81 shots at 8.6 per cent, 39 penalty minutes.

35 points is a career high by nineteen, in his fourth season, at twenty-two.

53 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,187 minutes, the 71st percentile — the best of any defenceman on this roster — with his ice at 60-48 against an expectation of 57.98-51.49.

He started 58.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 85th percentile: 378 attacking draws against 269 defensive ones. Soft minutes, which is what a twenty-two-year-old puck-mover on a good club gets, and the 71st percentile came out of them.

The Finesse Game

81 shots at a median of 47 feet, with 57 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 55 shots on goal and two goals — 3.64 per cent, on the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 19 shots and three goals, 15.79 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: six shots and two goals.

110 tracked attempts, 76 of them wrist shots — a 69.1 per cent share, the ninth-highest of the 153 defencemen in this book with a hundred attempts — and only 14 slap. His shot is measured at 97.4 mph, the 90th percentile, which is the surprise: a hundred and eighty-nine pounds and a 97 mph release without a wind-up.

13 goals and 50 assists in 159 career games. The 28 assists are the file: he takes the puck up the ice himself and gives it away late, and it is why a club paid a first-round pick for him at twenty-two.

This is the archetype this book keeps coming back to — a small defenceman whose value is entirely in what he does with the puck on his stick — and Sandin is a genuine, if modest, example of it.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 189 pounds, which is small for the position, with 39 penalty minutes in 71 games and 53 in 159 career games.

2.88 miles a game at the 72nd percentile, at a top speed of 21.9 mph, the 31st, with 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 17th.

So he is not fast and he covers a good deal of ground, which is the edge-work profile every mobile defenceman in this book shares.

He is not physical, does not win a battle by strength, and at 189 pounds cannot clear a crease, and that is the whole of the case against him.

He escapes a forecheck by turning into it and away, which is what a small defenceman has to do instead, and the 71st-percentile chance share says it worked last season.

The Intangibles

Twenty-ninth overall in 2018, four seasons, 159 games, 63 points across Toronto and Washington.

13 goals and 50 assists, and a plus-11.

He is twenty-three, a Swedish first-round pick who was traded at twenty-two for a first-round pick and a defenceman, which is close to an even return and says both clubs valued him highly.

Thirty-five points from a twenty-two-year-old defenceman is a genuinely promising number and it came out of soft minutes. What this file cannot yet say is what happens when the starts get harder, because on Toronto’s blue line and on Washington’s he has never once been asked.