Roman Josi

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

18 goals and 41 assists in 67 games — 59 points — at 25:10 a night. Plus-5, 269 shots, 36 penalty minutes, five game-winners.

Two hundred and sixty-nine shots on goal is second among all defencemen in the league, behind Hamilton’s 275 — and Josi took his in sixty-seven games to Hamilton’s eighty-two. Four shots a night is the highest rate of any defenceman in the league — Hamilton, second, is at 3.35.

49.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 49th percentile, with his ice at 63-46 against an expectation of 58.42-59.15 — thirteen goals better at the defensive end than the chances deserved, and that is Saros.

That 49.7 needs its deployment attached: he started 59.3 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone, the 89th percentile, 489 attacking draws against 336 defensive ones. A dead-average chance share from the top decile of zone starts is not a good result, and it is the one number in this file that argues against him.

Twelve seasons, 827 games, 601 points, all of them in Nashville.

The Finesse Game

269 shots at a median of 46 feet, 14 per cent from inside twenty and 63 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 162 shots on goal and 11 goals — 6.79 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. Inside forty: 102 shots, 7 goals, 6.86 per cent.

Read those two rates side by side, because they are nearly identical and that is extraordinary. Every other defenceman in this book converts two to five times better from inside forty than from outside it. Josi converts at 6.79 from range and 6.86 from close, which means the long shot is genuinely dangerous when he takes it and the close one is not.

This is the strongest single counter-example to the forty-foot split that the edition has found. Eleven goals from 162 long shots is not a hot month; it is a season, and it is more than double the rate his position returns. What this book has not been able to find is why: the shot he picks accounts for a point and a half of it across the league, and the rest is unexplained.

A hundred and forty-two slap shots out of 357 tracked attempts — 38 per cent, in a league where the defencemen’s share has fallen from 35.89 per cent in 2017-18 to 24.17. Nobody in these five chapters takes more.

97.3 mph at the 89th percentile, on that slap-shot volume, which makes it one of the few readings of that number in this book worth taking at face value.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 201, and 36 penalty minutes.

Top speed 20.8 mph. Among skaters who played forty games last season, only nine registered lower. Distance 3.49 miles a game, the 97th percentile.

That is the most extreme version of a shape this book has already had to correct itself about. Of the 192 defencemen with forty games, 59 covered three miles a game and 24 of those never broke 22 mph: heavy mileage at moderate speed is the top-pair job description, not a verdict. Josi sits at the bottom of the measured range inside that group and at the top of the mileage — twenty-five minutes a night at 20.8 mph.

He is not a physical defenceman and never has been. He defends by getting to the puck first with position rather than speed, and at thirty-three the gap between where he needs to be and how fast he gets there is the thing to watch.

The Intangibles

Thirty-eighth overall in 2008 out of Bern, a Norris Trophy in 2020, 96 points in 2021-22, and the captaincy since 2017.

He is one of the best offensive defencemen of his generation and the 49.7 per cent chance share from an 89th-percentile zone start is the case against that sentence. Both things are in the record.

What this book would want to know, and cannot, is how much of the thirteen-goal defensive surplus was Saros facing more shots than any goaltender in the league and stopping them.