Ryan Pulock

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

5 goals and 21 assists in 82 games — 26 points — at 20:54 a night, across 1,486 five-on-five minutes, the most of any Islander. Plus-10, 126 shots, 14 penalty minutes.

47.6 per cent of the expected goals, the 35th percentile, with his ice at 67-53 against an expectation of 57.76-63.47 — ten and a half goals better than the chances at the defensive end and nine better at the attacking.

And the deployment is the reason the first of those numbers is low. He was on the ice for 506 five-on-five draws in his own end against 363 in the other, the sixth-highest defensive-start count in the league and the highest on this club — 41.8 per cent, the 18th percentile.

Eight seasons, 428 games, 172 points, a career plus-52, all of it here.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 53 feet, 84 per cent of them from beyond forty, and five goals.

Beyond forty feet: 98 shots on goal and 3 goals — 3.06 per cent, which is the league rate for defencemen almost exactly. Nine shots all season from inside twenty.

So he is at the positional rate from range on high volume, which makes him neither the Dobson case nor its opposite: the shot goes to the net and the club scores at the ordinary rate off it.

78 slap shots out of 185 tracked attempts — 42 per cent, the highest share on this blue line — and a measured 101.6 mph, the fourth-fastest in the league. On that count the number means what it says.

A hundred and one miles an hour and three goals from beyond forty feet is the honest juxtaposition. The shot is enormous, it is aimed at a stick in the slot rather than at the net, and 129 career assists against 43 goals says which of those is the job.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 219, with fourteen penalty minutes in eighty-two games of the hardest zone starts on the club.

Top speed 22.8 mph, the 80th percentile; 0.7 bursts a game, the 38th; 2.90 miles a game, the 74th.

Good top-end speed he rarely needs, on heavy mileage — twenty-one minutes a night of defensive-zone hockey looks exactly like this.

He blocks shots, closes the gap early, and defends the front of his own net without taking penalties, which at five hundred defensive-zone starts is the single most impressive line in the file. Fourteen penalty minutes is not an accident; it is positioning.

The Intangibles

Fifteenth overall in 2013, and 428 games in one uniform.

The career plus-52 was assembled almost entirely from the wrong end of the rink, and the twenty-six points are what is left over when a defenceman spends his season starting in his own zone.

He is twenty-nine, and the pairing with Pelech has been the club’s best defensive unit for four years. What the file cannot say is how much of the plus-26.8 in goaltending value belongs to the pair in front of it, because this book has no way to separate them.