Ryan Graves

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

8 goals and 18 assists in 78 games — 26 points — at 19:57 a night for New Jersey. Plus-34, 141 shots at 5.7 per cent, two game-winners, 28 penalty minutes.

53.7 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 76th percentile, with his ice at 70-51 against an expectation of 64.94-56.08 across 1,349 minutes.

He started 43.3 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 22nd percentile — the hard half of New Jersey’s blue line, in front of a goal record that ran nineteen goals to the good.

That plus-34 is the second-highest of his career and it is not a fluke of a good club alone: the chance model expected his ice to be nine goals to the good and it finished nineteen.

The Finesse Game

141 shots at a median of 50 feet, with 66 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 4 per cent from inside twenty.

From beyond forty feet: 87 shots on goal and two goals — 2.30 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty, three from 41. Inside twenty, three from seven.

Eight goals is a career high for him and there is nothing in the chart to build on: he shoots from the point, it goes in at below the positional rate, and 45 of his 183 tracked attempts are slap shots.

92.2 mph at the 60th percentile. The offence is not the job and the club has never asked for it — no power-play goals in 302 career games.

The first pass is competent and unadventurous. He moves it to the near winger and goes back to the front of his own net.

The Physical Game

6-5 and 225 pounds, with a top speed of 20.9 mph — the 2nd percentile of the league. 0.2 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 4th percentile. He covers 2.76 miles a night, the 65th.

This is one of the few tracking lines in the book that says something unambiguous. Almost nobody in the league is slower at full stretch, and he plays twenty minutes a night against top lines anyway.

He defends by taking away space rather than by closing on the puck, which is the only way a man with those numbers survives the minutes: long stick, inside position, and contact at the net front rather than a race to the corner.

28 penalty minutes in 78 games is very low for that method, and 154 in 302 career games. He is punishing without being reckless — a heavy man who arrives, rather than one who goes looking.

The Intangibles

A hundred and tenth overall in 2013, the fourth round, and 302 games across five seasons in Colorado and New Jersey.

Plus-84 for a career, which is the number the club paid for, and 100 points from a defenceman who has never scored a power-play goal.

What this file cannot resolve is how much of the record is him. He has played all five of his seasons on clubs that controlled play, twice beside a first-pair partner doing the puck-carrying, and the on-ice goal differential of a stay-at-home defenceman is the most environment-dependent number in this book.

What the tracking does say, unambiguously, is that the method is real and unusual: nobody else defends twenty minutes a night from the second percentile of top speed.