TJ Brodie

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

2 goals and 12 assists in 58 games — 14 points — at 21:13 a night. Plus-10, 58 shots at 3.4 per cent, 14 penalty minutes.

58 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 95th percentile — the best of any defenceman on this roster — across 1,029 minutes, with his ice at 44-38 against an expectation of 45.90-33.25.

So the chances were strongly his and the goals were barely his: five more went in against him than the expectation called for. On a club that finished sixth in the league in goaltending, that is an unusual row to own.

He started 54.6 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 70th percentile.

Fourteen points in 58 games is 0.24 a game, the lowest rate of any season he has played more than three games.

The Finesse Game

58 shots at a median of 48 feet, with 61 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 8 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 33 shots on goal and two goals — 6.06 per cent, nearly double the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 22 shots and no goals. Inside twenty: three shots and no goals.

74 tracked attempts in 58 games — the eighth-lowest rate of the 148 defencemen in this book who played a thousand minutes at five-on-five. Nine of them are slap shots. His shot is measured at 88.8 mph, the 36th percentile.

He does not shoot. That is not a criticism the record can dress up: 55 goals in 830 games at 5.8 per cent, and two last season.

What he does instead is retrieve the puck and give it to somebody facing the right way, and 267 career assists against 55 goals is what that looks like written down. The 95th-percentile chance share is the same fact from the other side.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 187 pounds, which is very light for a defenceman playing twenty-one minutes, with 14 penalty minutes in 58 games and 254 in 830 career games.

Top speed 21.9 mph at the 31st percentile, 0.4 bursts above twenty a game at the 20th, 2.96 miles a game at the 78th. A lot of ground covered without ever going quickly, which at thirty-three is the tracking line of a positional defenceman.

He defends with his stick and his angle rather than his body, and at 187 pounds that is the only version of the job available to him.

14 penalty minutes in 58 games is a remarkably low total for a top-four defenceman, and it is the same fact again: he does not put himself in situations that require a penalty to get out of.

The Intangibles

A hundred and fourteenth overall in 2008, the fourth round, thirteen seasons, 830 games, 322 points across Calgary and Toronto.

55 goals and 267 assists, and a plus-67.

He is thirty-three, on the last stretch of a career built entirely on reading a play early, and the fourth-round pick who has played eight hundred and thirty games is the part of the record that never gets said.

What the file describes is a defenceman whose value has never appeared in a box score and appears immediately in an expected-goal column. A 95th-percentile chance share at twenty-one minutes a night is the best number any Toronto defenceman produced last season, and 14 points is what the newspaper will print.