Tyson Barrie

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

13 goals and 42 assists in 85 games — 55 points — split between Edmonton and Nashville. Minus-7, 19:46 a night, 163 shots, 36 penalty minutes.

Eighty-five games, because the trade fell between two schedules.

49.0 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 43rd percentile, with his ice at 51-55 against an expectation of 57.48-59.79 — six goals short at the offensive end and five better at the defensive.

He started 50.8 per cent of his five-on-five shifts in the attacking zone, the 50th percentile, so the deployment was exactly neutral and the 43rd-percentile chance share is his own.

Twelve seasons, 768 games, 490 points, of which 382 are assists.

The Finesse Game

163 shots at a median of 52 feet, 9 per cent from inside twenty and 71 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 111 shots on goal and 9 goals — 8.11 per cent, the highest rate of any defenceman in these five chapters and more than double the league rate of 3.17. Inside forty: 45 shots, 4 goals.

He and Josi between them put 273 shots on goal from beyond forty feet and scored 20 — 7.33 per cent. Detroit’s seven defencemen took 517 from the same distance and scored 16. That is the same test on two blue lines and it comes back with opposite answers.

Ninety-nine slap shots out of 220 tracked attempts — a shade under half, and the second-highest count in this batch behind Josi’s hundred. The two of them are the reason Nashville’s blue line breaks the pattern, and the tempting explanation is that a point shot only pays if it is a real point shot. Measured across the league it is worth about a point and a half of conversion, which is a good deal less than the gap it is being asked to explain.

96.3 mph at the 85th percentile, on that volume, so the reading holds.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 197, and 36 penalty minutes in 85 games.

Top speed 21.7 mph, the 22nd percentile; bursts 0.2 a game, the 6th percentile; 2.81 miles a game, the 68th.

One burst of speed every five games, from a defenceman who plays twenty minutes. That is close to the floor of the league and it is the reason the defensive record has followed him through four organisations.

He does not take the body, does not clear a crease and does not defend the front of his own net. Everything he is worth is at the other end.

The Intangibles

Sixty-fourth overall in 2009 to Colorado, and then Toronto, Edmonton and Nashville — three organisations in four seasons.

The career line is 108 goals and 382 assists in 768 games, which is a genuinely productive offensive defenceman, and a defensive record that has caused four clubs to move him. Both halves are real.

He is thirty-two. Nashville wants the power play and will have to live with the rest, and on a club that finished twenty-fourth in chance generation, the power play is the part it needs.