Tyler Myers

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

1 goal and 16 assists in 78 games — 17 points — at 20:54 a night. Minus-16, 100 shots at 1.0 per cent, 76 penalty minutes.

One goal, for the second season running. He scored one on 128 shots in 2021-22 and one on 100 last season.

44.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 13th percentile, across 1,416 minutes — the second-most on this roster — with his ice at 56-78 against an expectation of 50.58-63.02. Fifteen more goals against than the chances called for, and six more for.

He started 44.2 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 25th percentile: 342 attacking draws against 432 defensive ones. So it is hard minutes, and a 13th-percentile chance share out of them at twenty-one a night.

The Finesse Game

100 shots at a median of 51 feet, with 67 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 10 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 63 shots on goal and one goal — 1.59 per cent, half the league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 25 shots and no goals. Inside twenty: 11 shots and no goals.

Thirty-six shots on goal from inside forty feet and not one of them went in. The single goal came from the point.

142 tracked attempts, 38 of them slap shots — a 26.8 per cent share — and a shot measured at 98.2 mph, the 92nd percentile. He is, on paper, the exact player the old argument for the point shot describes, and he has one goal in two seasons and 228 shots to show for it.

88 goals in 918 career games at 5.8 per cent, with 11 of them in his rookie year. The offence stopped a decade ago and has not come back.

The Physical Game

6-8 and 229 pounds — the tallest skater in this book — with 76 penalty minutes in 78 games and 710 in 918 career games.

Top speed 22.6 mph at the 66th percentile, 0.5 bursts above twenty a game at the 25th, 2.84 miles a game at the 70th. For a man this size those are respectable numbers and always have been.

The reach is enormous and it is the entire defensive method. He takes a puck off a stick from further away than anybody else on the ice can, and against a rush that respects it he is genuinely difficult to get past.

He is punishing when he chooses to be and 710 career penalty minutes say he chooses to be often enough.

The problem is what happens when the first reach misses. He is long rather than agile, the recovery is slow, and the second and third chances in the expected-goals column against him are what a 13th-percentile share is made of.

The Intangibles

Twelfth overall in 2008, fourteen seasons, 918 games, 342 points across Buffalo, Winnipeg and Vancouver, and a Calder Trophy for a 48-point rookie season in 2009-10.

88 goals and 254 assists, and a minus-7 across fourteen years.

He is thirty-three, on a contract that has been criticised since the day he signed it, playing twenty-one minutes a night on a club that finished twenty-fourth in chance share.

The file is a fair one and it is not flattering. A 48-point rookie defenceman is now a 17-point one; the reach still works; the chance share on his ice has been below average for years; and he is being paid for what he did at nineteen.