Photo: Patrick Smith

With Brooks Orpik returning from injury on Tuesday night against the Kings, Taylor Chorney found himself as a healthy scratch for the first time in 40 games. As Mike Vogel pointed out, this was the longest consecutive game streak of Chorney’s career and he performed admirably during the stretch.

Grubauer is indeed starting. Orpik returns and Chorney will sit after 40 straight games in lineup, longest run of his career. Job well done. — Mike Vogel (@VogsCaps) February 16, 2016

New York Rangers defenseman Our friend Kevin Klein over at Japers’ Rink also discussed how sturdy Chorney was during Orpik’s extended absence.

Take yourself back to September and imagine that I tell you by mid-February Chorney will have played 45 games. In Washington, not Hershey. I’d imagine this would have caused concern for anyone telling the truth. That’s not a knock on Chorney in particular, but any team would generally be concerned by such a prognostication in regards to their seventh defenseman playing so much.

So today, we salute Taylor Chorney for the great job he did during the time he was called into regular action on the Caps’ third defensive pair. Put in a situation where a 7th defenseman plays about half a season’s worth of consecutive games, I think most teams would just pray that the player didn’t get embarrassed regularly. Not only did Chorney not get embarrassed, he was solid.

Here’s a lot at how he ranked in a few categories. In parenthesis is Chorney’s percentile rank among the 173 defensemen who have played at least 500 5v5 minutes this season. All numbers from War on Ice.

Stat Number (Percentile) Shot Attempt % 51.9 (70th) Relative Shot Attempt % -0.1 (52nd) Shot Attempts Against/60 48.9 (80th) Goals For % 61.2 (96th)

Obviously these numbers lack context such as deployments and PDO, but any team should welcome this kind of performance from their seventh defender, regardless of context.

Health willing, it will likely be a while before Chorney sees regular playing time again. But the Caps can be secure in the fact that he’s at the ready to provide capable minutes when called upon.