Thomas Chabot

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

11 goals and 30 assists in 68 games — 41 points — at 24:58 a night, the ninth-heaviest ice time in the league. Minus-11, 165 shots, five on the power play, 52 penalty minutes.

1,355 five-on-five minutes across sixty-eight games, which is a rate almost nobody in the book matches.

51.6 per cent of the expected goals, the 63rd percentile, with his ice at 65-69 against an expectation of 63.43-59.61, which is ten goals past the chances at the defensive end.

He started 47.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 34th percentile: 411 attacking draws against 459, which is the hardest deployment on this blue line and is given to the man who plays the most.

Seven seasons, 381 games, 229 points, and a career minus-73.

The Finesse Game

165 shots at a median of 46 feet, and eleven goals.

Beyond forty feet: 89 shots on goal and 5 goals — 5.62 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 41 shots and 3 goals. Inside twenty: 22 shots and 3 goals.

Well above the positional rate from range on real volume, which puts him on the right side of the forty-foot arithmetic alongside Josi, Hamilton and Dobson.

67 slap shots out of 228 tracked attempts — 29 per cent — with 118 wrist shots. 96.4 mph at the 86th percentile, on that count, so the reading holds.

176 career assists against 53 goals. The walk along the blue line and the pass off it are what twenty-five minutes a night is for.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 200, with 52 penalty minutes.

Three and three-quarter miles a game — the third-highest figure in the league behind Rasmus Dahlin and Connor McDavid, and the most of any man in this batch. Top speed 22.1 mph, the 40th percentile. 0.9 bursts a game, the 49th.

That is the shape this book keeps finding and the most extreme forward-facing version of it: enormous ground covered at a completely ordinary top speed. Twenty-five minutes is a great deal of skating and almost none of it is a sprint.

What it costs him is the recovery. A defenceman beaten wide at the 40th percentile of speed does not get back, and nine and a half goals past expectation on his ice is partly that and partly the goaltending behind him.

He is not physical and does not clear his crease. Everything defensive is stick and position.

The Intangibles

Eighteenth overall in 2015, and 381 games without ever playing for anybody else.

A career minus-73 across seven seasons on a club that has not made the playoffs in any of them, and 229 points from a defenceman who has never had a team-mate scoring at Stützle’s rate until now.

He is twenty-six, signed long, and playing more minutes than all but eight men in the league. The file’s real question is durability: sixty-eight games last season, and 59, 49, 71 and 70 in the four before it, at this workload, is a pattern rather than bad luck.