Victor Hedman

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

9 goals and 40 assists in 76 games — 49 points — at 23:43 a night. Plus-10, 185 shots at 4.9 per cent, one on the power play, one shorthanded, 42 penalty minutes.

49 points is his lowest full-season total since 2015-16 and 4.9 per cent is the lowest shooting percentage of his career.

50 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,412 minutes, the 45th percentile, with his ice at 62-58 against an expectation of 64.57-64.52 — two goals short at the good end and six over at the other.

He started 59.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 89th percentile: 481 attacking draws against 329 defensive ones.

A 45th-percentile chance share out of that deployment at thirty-two is the number this file has to sit with. It is the first ordinary season of a fourteen-year career.

The Finesse Game

185 shots at a median of 48 feet, with 64 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 118 shots on goal and four goals — 3.39 per cent, which is the league rate for defencemen of 3.17 almost exactly. From twenty to forty: 48 shots and five goals, 10.42, above the league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: ten shots and none.

A hundred and eighteen shots on goal from the point is the thirteenth-highest volume in the league and it returned the positional rate to within a quarter of a point.

And his shot is measured at 101.3 mph, the 99th percentile — the hardest on this roster and one of the ten hardest in the league — with 82 of his 284 tracked attempts slap shots, a 28.9 per cent share.

The hardest shot in the chapter, a slap share near a third, and the league average from range. That is the finding stated as plainly as this book can state it. It is not that the point shot never pays; it is that knowing how hard a man shoots and how often he winds up tells you nothing about whether it will.

The 40 assists are the offensive file and always have been: 509 career assists against 143 goals, from a defenceman who walks the line and passes rather than shoots.

The Physical Game

6-7 and 244 pounds, with 3.43 miles a game at the 96th percentile and a top speed of 22.8 mph at the 79th, on 0.8 bursts above twenty a game at the 47th.

That is an extraordinary tracking line for a man of that size at thirty-two, and it is the reason he has played twenty-three minutes a night for a decade. He is one of the largest skaters in this book and covers more ground than nineteen in twenty of them.

42 penalty minutes in 76 games and 666 in 974 career games. He defends with reach first and weight second, which at 6-7 with a 6-7 wingspan takes away the pass before the body is needed.

He is hard to move at the net front and does not need to be nasty about it: the size does the work and the stick does the rest.

The Intangibles

Second overall in 2009, fourteen seasons, 974 games, 652 points, all of them here, two Stanley Cups and a Norris Trophy.

143 goals and 509 assists, a plus-157, and five seasons above 50 points.

He is thirty-two, and last season is the first in which the chance share came out ordinary. That is worth flagging without over-reading: 1,412 five-on-five minutes at the 45th percentile on a club that finished thirteenth is a good defenceman’s average year, and it is a long way below where this file used to sit.

Whether that is age or the pair beside him is the question the next season answers.