Sebastian Aho

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 18 assists in 71 games — 23 points — at 16:46 a night. Plus-9, 89 shots, 22 penalty minutes, across 1,084 five-on-five minutes.

52.5 per cent of the expected goals, the 70th percentile — the highest of any Islanders defenceman. His ice finished 48-41 against an expectation of 46.02-41.66, which is to say the goals came out where the chances said.

Attach the deployment before reading that as a verdict, because on this club it is never neutral. He started 61.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 92nd percentile: 337 attacking draws against 214, while Pelech was taking 431 of the other kind. Both men finished above fifty. Only one of them was asked to do it from his own goal line.

Four seasons, 132 games, 41 points.

The Finesse Game

89 shots at a median of 52 feet, 75 per cent from beyond forty, and five goals.

Beyond forty: 59 shots on goal and 2 goals. Inside twenty: eight shots and two goals.

The shot is not the file. The file is that a 5-10, 180-pound defenceman gets the puck out of his own end cleanly enough to hold a top-four job on a club whose other five defencemen average a shade over 6-2 and 213 pounds.

He does it by turning away from pressure rather than absorbing it, taking the puck below his own goal line and coming out the other side, and by making the short pass rather than the long one. 78 wrist shots and 34 slap out of 131 tracked attempts.

32 career assists against 9 goals. Everything in the offensive half of the file goes through somebody else, and he is good enough at delivering it that eighteen assists came from sixteen minutes a night.

The Physical Game

5-10 and 180 pounds, with 22 penalty minutes.

Top speed 22.1 mph, the 38th percentile; 0.5 bursts a game, the 24th; 2.32 miles a game, the 32nd.

That is the surprise, and it is worth being exact about it: he is not a small defenceman who survives on skating. The measurements say ordinary speed, few sprints and low mileage. What he survives on is position, angles and the willingness to take the puck into the corner knowing what happens next.

He cannot win a puck against a heavy forward on the wall and does not try. He is moved off the front of his own net, and the club protects him from having to be there by giving him the attacking end and a partner who is not.

That is the whole trade and it works. A defenceman this size holding a regular job at all is unusual enough that the 92nd-percentile zone starts are the price rather than the objection.

The Intangibles

One hundred and thirty-ninth overall in 2017, the fifth round, out of Umea, and 132 games spread across six seasons of not being able to hold the job.

Seventy-one games last season is more than his previous four years combined.

He is twenty-seven, which means this is what he is rather than what he might become. What the file argues is that a small, ordinary-skating defenceman who moves the puck can be a genuinely useful third-pair player if the club is honest about where to start him — and that the Islanders, of all clubs, are unusually willing to be honest about that.