Pierre-Luc Dubois: 2024-25 season review:
Simply put, Pierre-Luc Dubois was Washington’s most valuable player, and one of the most improved players in the entire league.
Isolated Impact by HockeyViz
About this visualization: This image by Micah Blake McCurdy of hockeyviz.com shows how the player has impacted play when on the ice. At the top of the image is the team’s offense (even strength at left, power play at right) and at bottom is the team’s defense (with penalty kill at bottom right). In each case, red/orange blobs mean teams shoot for more from that location on the ice, and blue/purple means less. In general, a good player should have red/orange blobs near the opponent’s net at top, and blue/purple blobs near their own team’s net at bottom. The distributions in middle show how the player compares to league average at individual finishing, setting up teammates to score, and taking and drawing penalties. The number at center is Synthetic Goals: a catch-all number for the player’s impact.
Player Card by All Three Zones
About this player card: This image from Corey Sznajder of All Three Zones shows how the player compares to league averages in different microstats in the defensive, neutral, and offensive zones. Blue bars mean the player has a higher rate in that statistic compared to league average, and orange means a lower rate. The numbers are Z-scores, also known as standard deviations, indicating how far the number is from league average, where more than two standard deviations means the player is on the extreme edge of the league.
Player Card by Evolving Hockey
About this player card: This card from Josh and Luke of Evolving Hockey compares the player to league averages based on their impact on on-ice statistics. GAR means “goals above replacement,” where “replacement” means an average player called up from the AHL. xGAR is the same figure but assuming league-average goaltending. The numbers at top are the player’s percentile ranks overall and then for offense and defense alone.
Player Overview by NHL Edge
About this visualization: The NHL’s advanced statistics program, Edge, tracks player and puck movement. At left are the player’s numbers in various statistics along with the average number for that same stat among players of the same position and the player’s percentile rank in it. At right is a radar chart for various statistics, where the bigger the shape the better the player performs in those measures.
Fan Happiness Survey
Peter’s Take
“Locker-room cancer” is what I heard about Pierre-Luc Dubois in LA, Columbus, and Winnipeg, from everyone except for Chris Cerullo. Dubois in Washington was a cure-all. It’s hard to overstate how much he made the team better. Makes you wonder what went wrong everywhere else.
Measured by goals-above-replacement, as reckoned by Evolving Hockey, the top three most-improved players in 2024-25 are Dubois in third, my son Jonas Siegenthaler in second, and Dubois’ linemate Tom Wilson in first. Only seven players had a higher total GAR figure, and two of them are playing for the Oilers in the Final this week. Last season in LA, Dubois had a negative on-ice goal differential and often played bottom-six minutes. In Washington, he was a top-six staple and made everyone around him better. Way better.
Of the 12 skaters with whom Dubois shared at least 60 minutes of five-on-five play, only two saw the team control fewer expected goals when away from him: defensive defenders Fehervary and van Riemsdyk. And those two still had a plus-10 actual goal differential on the ice with Dubois. His line with Protas and Wilson was Washington’s best (except for maybe one that will surprise you later in this series).
It’s a stretch to say something bad about the player. Here’s two: he didn’t score in the playoffs, and he had a high shooting percentage (14.1) that he’s unlikely to repeat.
But on balance, acquiring Dubois was the single best move Washington made last year. (I’ll add that it was a win-win, with Darcy Kuemper doing great in LA, so warm and fuzzy feelings all around.)
Dubois is only 26. He’s going to play the rest of his 20’s with Washington. It’s going to be great. Enjoy.
