Seth Jones

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

Sixty-seven games, 8 goals and 23 assists, and 25:29 a night — the most on the club and the ninth season in a row he has played more than twenty-two minutes. He took 44.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,280 minutes, the 15th percentile, and his ice went 31-57 against an expectation of 45.70-57.58. The goals against arrived exactly as the chances said they would. The goals for came in fifteen under, which is the club’s whole season in one line and not a thing he can be asked to fix from the blue line.

He is minus-115 across 797 games and has never once played on a club that controlled play. That is a fact about employers as much as about the man, and it is worth stating before anything else on this page.

The Finesse Game

He carries the puck out of his own zone rather than passing it out, and at 6-4 with a long stride he is very hard to close down through the neutral zone. The exit is the most valuable thing he does and it is the reason a bad club plays him twenty-five minutes.

He walks the line and holds the puck until a forechecker commits, then moves it late — 315 career assists in 797 games, and 23 of them last season on a roster that could not finish. He took 172 shots at a median of 49 feet with 70 per cent from beyond 40, which is the point shot of a man whose job is to get it through rather than to score, and 8 went in.

The Physical Game

He defends with position and stick rather than force. Thirty-four penalty minutes in 67 games and 286 in 797 is a low rate for a defenceman who plays the hardest minutes on his club, and it comes from taking the right angle early rather than from restraint arriving late.

He is not a punishing man along the wall and does not clear his own crease by moving people out of it. On a club that was 30th in the league at suppressing chances, that shows.

The Intangibles

He was the fourth pick of the 2013 draft and has been asked to be the best defenceman on rebuilding clubs in Columbus and now Chicago for a decade. Twenty-five and a half minutes a night at 30, on a club that won twenty-three games, is a workload accepted without complaint.

The question the next two seasons will answer is whether he is a first pair defenceman on a good club or the man who plays the most on a bad one. Nothing in his record settles it, because nothing in his record has ever put him on a good one.