Torey Krug

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

7 goals and 25 assists in 63 games — 32 points — at 18:35 a night. Minus-26, 126 shots at 5.6 per cent, four on the power play, 49 penalty minutes.

47.2 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 957 minutes, the 27th percentile, with his ice at 41-50 against an expectation of 41.38-46.26.

He started 73.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone: 464 attacking draws against 168 defensive ones. That is the 100th percentile, the highest share of any defenceman in this book, and the second-highest of any skater in it behind Mathew Barzal.

Which makes the rest of the line hard to read charitably. A 27th-percentile chance share out of the softest deployment given to any defenceman in the league is a poor season, and the minus-26 that came with it is not the goaltender’s fault.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 46 feet, with 62 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 4 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 78 shots on goal and two goals — 2.56 per cent, below the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 36 shots and three goals, 8.33, on the league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: five shots and two goals.

He slaps 65 of his 179 tracked attempts, a 36.3 per cent share, and converts below the positional rate from range. That is the second St. Louis defenceman on this page to do so on a slap share above a third.

The 25 assists are the file and always have been. 359 career assists against 85 goals from a 5-9 defenceman is a genuinely unusual career line, and it comes from one thing: he runs a power play from the top of the umbrella and finds the seam pass before the box has set.

92.6 mph at the 63rd percentile — a hard shot for his size, and one that has never converted at the rate its velocity suggests.

The Physical Game

5-9 and 194 pounds, with 0.0 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game — the 1st percentile of the league — and a top speed of 21.3 mph at the 8th. He covers 2.58 miles a night at the 51st.

That is the whole of the defensive problem in one line. A 5-9 defenceman who never reaches twenty miles an hour cannot recover a beaten gap and cannot win a race to the corner, and the 27th-percentile chance share out of a 73rd-per-cent attacking-zone start is the arithmetic consequence.

This book has a standing interest in small defencemen who dominate. Krug is the case that says the size is not the thing — the feet are. Quinn Hughes is at the 96th percentile of sprints and the 99th of ground covered; Cale Makar is at the 99th of top speed and the 100th of sprints. Krug is at the 1st and the 8th, and no amount of vision compensates for that once the puck is going the other way.

49 penalty minutes in 63 games and 342 in 701 career games. He is beaten to the outside and reaches, which is where a fair share of those minutes come from.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, twelve seasons, 701 games, 444 points across Boston and St. Louis.

85 goals and 359 assists. A 5-9 defenceman who was not drafted and has played seven hundred NHL games at twenty minutes a night has already done something almost nobody does, and the power play is why: 32 power-play goals and a great many more assists on them.

He is thirty-two, and this is where the file turns. The two St. Louis seasons before this one produced 32 points in 51 games and 43 in 64 on far better clubs, at a plus-11 and a plus-23.

What the club is now carrying is a power-play specialist at eighteen minutes a night on a team that finished twenty-ninth in power-play chances created.