Simon Benoit

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

3 goals and 7 assists in 78 games — 10 points — at 19:21 a night for Anaheim. Minus-29, 82 shots at 3.7 per cent, 60 penalty minutes.

37.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 1st percentile — the lowest of any defenceman in this book who played a thousand minutes — across 1,255 minutes, with his ice at 40-71 against an expectation of 41.74-70.24. A 41.7 per cent share of the attempts.

The goals matched the chances almost exactly at both ends, which is the part that should worry a reader. Nothing here was bad luck. The ice really was that lopsided.

He started 36.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 9th percentile: 254 attacking draws against 435 defensive ones.

Some of that number is Anaheim, which finished thirty-second of thirty-two in even-strength chance share. Some of it is 1,255 minutes at nineteen a night on the worst club in the league, taking the defensive-zone half of it, as an undrafted twenty-four-year-old in his first full season. Those are not the same thing, and this book cannot separate them.

The Finesse Game

82 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 68 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 9 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 49 shots on goal and three goals — 6.12 per cent, nearly double the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 20 shots and no goals. Inside twenty: eight shots and no goals.

120 tracked attempts, 48 of them slap shots — a 40.0 per cent share, the ninth-highest of the 153 defencemen in this book who took a hundred attempts — and a shot measured at 99.6 mph, the 96th percentile.

And here the point-shot argument this edition has spent five chapters dismantling gets its best single counter-example. The hardest shot on this blue line, the largest slap share of any defenceman on it who took a hundred attempts, and a long-range conversion at nearly twice the positional rate. Forty-nine shots on goal is a small enough sample that one goal moves it by two points, and the finding across the whole league still holds — but it is the shape the argument predicted, and it should be said plainly rather than buried.

Three goals in a season and four in 137 career games. Whatever he is for, it is not this.

The Physical Game

6-4 and 210 pounds, with 60 penalty minutes in 78 games and 84 in 137 career games.

Top speed 21.8 mph at the 24th percentile, 0.9 bursts above twenty a game at the 49th, 2.43 miles a game at the 38th. Below average on two of three, from a man playing nineteen minutes a night.

He clears the front of his net and he is difficult to move off a puck along the wall, which at 6-4 is the reason an undrafted defenceman got 1,255 minutes at all.

The feet are the problem. He is beaten wide and he cannot recover, and a defenceman who defends by arriving rather than by containing gives up the chances the expected-goal column records.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, three seasons, 137 games, 15 points, all of them in Anaheim.

Four goals and eleven assists, and a minus-37.

He is twenty-five, signed by a club that finished fourth in the league, and the reasonable expectation is a third pair and a penalty kill rather than nineteen minutes.

The number to watch is what happens to the 37.3 per cent. If it moves to the middle behind a better team, the season above was mostly Anaheim. If it does not, it was mostly him, and Toronto will have found that out at a low price.