Vince Dunn

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

14 goals and 50 assists in 81 games — 64 points — at 23:40 a night. Plus-28, 149 shots at 9.4 per cent, no power-play goals at all, two game-winners, 55 penalty minutes.

Sixty-four points is a career high by 29, and it is the more remarkable for where none of it came from: fourteen goals at even strength and shorthanded, and nothing on the man advantage.

54.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,574 minutes, the 83rd percentile, with his ice at 103-65 against an expectation of 72.47-59.71. Thirty goals more than the chances called for at the good end.

He started 63.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 95th percentile: 604 attacking draws against 347 defensive ones. This is a first-pair defenceman being deployed like a forward, and it worked.

The Finesse Game

149 shots at a median of 49 feet, with 65 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty.

Beyond forty feet: 97 shots on goal and seven goals — 7.22 per cent, against a league rate for defencemen of 3.17. From twenty to forty: 44 shots and six goals, 13.64 against a league rate of 8.83. Inside twenty: nine shots and one goal.

More than double the positional rate from range, on 97 shots on goal.

And the slap shot is here again, on the other side of the ledger. He slaps 74 of his 225 tracked attempts — 32.9 per cent, which is Kris Letang’s share exactly and two points above Jacob Trouba’s. Letang converted at 2.75 from range and Trouba at 1.33; Dunn converts at 7.22. Three defencemen, the same proportion of slap shots, and rates that differ by a factor of five.

The correlation between slap share and long-range conversion across the 109 defencemen with sixty or more long shots on goal is r = 0.291. Dunn is one more demonstration that most of it is something this book cannot see.

96.4 mph at the 86th percentile. The 50 assists are the larger number: at 23:40 a night with the highest attacking-zone start share of any defenceman on the club, the first pass out and the walk along the line are the job.

The Physical Game

6-0 and 200 pounds, and 3.38 miles a game at the 95th percentile at a top speed of 21.8 mph, the 23rd, with 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 29th.

That is the shape this book keeps finding on defencemen who play twenty-four minutes: enormous ground covered and very little of it at speed. It describes the workload rather than the skater.

What the skating actually is shows up in the assists. He walks the line and changes the angle before releasing, which is why 97 shots from beyond forty feet went in at more than double the positional rate, and it is the one thing in this file the tracking data has no column for.

55 penalty minutes in 81 games and 228 in 421 career games. He is not a heavy defenceman and the penalties are stick fouls rather than contact.

The Intangibles

Fifty-sixth overall in 2015, the second round, six seasons, 421 games, 201 points across St. Louis and Seattle.

The four St. Louis seasons produced between 20 and 35 points at seventeen minutes a night. The two in Seattle produced 35 and 64 at twenty-one and twenty-four.

He is twenty-six, and this is the clearest case in the chapter of a player who was simply not given the ice: the same man at 17:14 a night and at 23:40 is two different files, and only one of them was ever going to show what he is.

A plus-28 on a club that outscored its chances by forty goals should be discounted. The 50 assists should not be, and neither should 1,574 five-on-five minutes at an 83rd-percentile chance share.