Will Borgen

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

3 goals and 17 assists in 82 games — 20 points — at 16:22 a night. Plus-11, 76 shots at 3.9 per cent, one game-winner, 47 penalty minutes.

It was his first full NHL season; he had played fifty games in the three before it.

50.1 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,213 minutes, the 46th percentile, with his ice at 59-51 against an expectation of 45.35-45.10 — fourteen goals more than the chances at the good end, which on this club was the ordinary experience.

He started 38.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 11th percentile: 238 attacking draws against 374 defensive ones. He and Jamie Oleksiak took the defensive half of Seattle’s blue-line deployment between them, and both finished on the right side of the goals.

The Finesse Game

76 shots at a median of 53 feet, with 75 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 5 per cent from inside twenty.

Beyond forty feet: 57 shots on goal and no goals at all. From twenty to forty: 12 shots and three goals, 25.00 per cent. Inside twenty: six shots and none.

All three of his goals came from the twelve shots he took between twenty and forty feet, and fifty-seven from the point produced nothing. Against a league rate of 3.17 per cent, fifty-seven shots should have returned about two goals; the gap is noise rather than a finding, and it is the kind of noise that follows a defenceman around for a season.

114 tracked attempts, 20 of them slap shots — a 17.5 per cent share — and 77 wrist. 95.0 mph at the 78th percentile.

Five goals in 132 career games. There is nothing offensive here and the club has never needed any.

The first pass is the useful skill: 17 assists from a defenceman starting four shifts in ten in his own end is the record of a man who gets the puck out cleanly.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 199 pounds. Top speed 22.4 mph at the 57th percentile, 0.8 bursts above twenty a game at the 41st, 2.41 miles a game at the 37th.

An ordinary tracking line for a defensive defenceman playing sixteen minutes, and nothing in it stands out in either direction.

He defends with contact: he steps up on the wall, takes the body, and at 6-3 he ends possessions rather than delaying them.

47 penalty minutes in 82 games and 79 in 132 career games. That is a high rate and it is the honest cost of a defenceman who plays the eleventh percentile of zone starts and does not have the feet to recover when he is beaten to the outside.

The Intangibles

Ninety-second overall in 2015, the fourth round, four seasons, 132 games, 28 points across Buffalo and Seattle.

He was twenty-five before he played thirty NHL games in a season, and twenty-six before he played eighty.

He is twenty-six, and the season above is the entire evidence: 1,213 five-on-five minutes at the 11th percentile of zone starts on the third-stingiest club in the league by chances allowed, and a plus-11 out of it.

That is a genuine second-pair season from a fourth-round pick who spent four years being nobody’s plan. Whether it repeats is the only question in the file.